A  HISTORY  OF  THE  SCIENCES 

Astronomy.     By  GEORGE  FORBES 

Chemistry,  2  vols.     By  Sir  EDWARD  THORPE 

Old  Testament  Criticism.     By   Prof.    ARCHIBALD 

DUFF 

New  Testament  Criticism.     By  F.  C.  CONYBEARE 
Anthropology.     By  ALFRED  C.  HADDON 
Geology.     By  H.  B.  WOODWARD 
Biology.     By  L.  C.  Mi  ALL 
Ancient  Philosophy.     By  A.  W.  BENN 
Geography.     By  Dr  SCOTT  KELTIE 
Modern  Philosophy.     By  A.  W.  BENN 
Psychology.     By  J.  N.  BALDWIN 


Q.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

New  York  London 


GIORDANO  BRUNO 

From  the  Statue  in  the  Campo  del  Fiori,  Rome 


A  HISTORY  OF   THE  SCIENCES 

HISTORY 

OF 

MODERN 
PHILOSOPHY 


BY 

A.   W.   BE  N  N 

» i 

AUTHOR    OF    "  THE    HISTORY    OF    ENGLISH    RATIONALISM   IN  THE  NINE- 
TEENTH   CENTURY,"    "  HISTORY    OF    ANCIENT    PHILOSOPHY,"    ETC. 


Wl  fH   ILL  USTP. 4  TIO  F 


G.  P..  PUTNAM'S  SONS 
NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 

fmlcfcerbocfcer  press 

1912 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

GIORDANO  BRUNO         .         .        .        .    Frontispiece 

FRANCIS  BACON             16 

RENE  DESCARTES 38 

BENEDICIUS  SPINOZA 56 

DAVID  HUME 94 

IMMANUEL  KANT 104 

G.  W.  F.  HEGEL 136 

ARTHUR  SCHOPENHAUER 142 

AUGUSTE  COMTE 154 

HERBERT  SPENCER        .        .  166 


UNIV. 


MODERN  PHILOSOPHY 


CHAPTER  I. 

THE    PHILOSOPHICAL    RENAISSANCE 

FOR  a  thousand  years  after  the  schools  of 
Athens  were  closed  by  Justinian  philo- 
sophy made  no  real  advance;  no  essentially  new 
ideas  about  the  constitution  of  nature,  the  work- 
ings of  mind,  or  the  ends  of  life  were  put  forward. 
It  would  be  false  to  say  that  during  this  period 
no  progress  was  made.  The  civilisation  of  the 
Roman  Empire  was  extended  far  beyond  its 
ancient  frontiers ;  and,  although  much  ground  was 
lost  in  Asia  and  Africa,  more  than  the  equivalent 
was  gained  in  Northern  Europe.  Within  Europe 
also  the  gradual  abolition  of  slavery  and  the 
increasing  dignity  of  peaceful  labour  gave  a 
wider  diffusion  to  culture,  combined  with  a 
larger  sense  of  human  fellowship  than  any  but 
the  best  minds  of  Greece  and  Rome  had  felt. 
Whether  the  status  of  women  was  really  raised 
may  be  doubted ;  but  the  ideas  and  sentiments  of 
i 


2  'Modern  Philosophy 

women  began  to  exercise  an  influence  on  social 
intercourse  unknown  before.  And  the  arts  of 
war  and  peace  were  in  some  ways  almost 
revolutionised. 

This  remarkable  phenomenon  of  movement 
in  everything  except  ideas  has  been  explained 
by  the  influence  of  Christianity,  or  rather  of 
Catholicism.  There  is  truth  in  the  contention, 
but  it  is  not  the  whole  truth.  The  Church 
entered  into  a  heritage  that  she  did  not  create; 
she  defined  and  accentuated  tendencies  that 
long  before  her  advent  had  secretly  been  at  work. 
In  the  West  that  diffusion  of  civilisation  which 
is  her  historic  boast  had  been  begun  and  carried 
far  by  the  Rome  whence  her  very  name  is  taken. 
In  the  East  the  title  of  orthodox  by  which 
the  Greek  Church  is  distinguished  betrays  the 
presence  of  that  Greek  thought  which  moulded 
her  dogmas  into  logical  shape.  What  is  more, 
the  very  idea  of  right  belief  as  a  vital  and  saving 
thing  came  to  Christianity  from  Platonism, 
accompanied  by  the  persuasion  that  wrong 
belief  was  immoral  and  its  promulgation  a 
crime  to  be  visited  by  the  penalty  of  death. 

Ecclesiastical  intolerance  has  been  made 
responsible  for  the  speculative  stagnation  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  and  it  has  been  explained  as  an 
effect  of  the  belief  in  the  future  punishment  of 
heresy  by  eternal  torments.  But  in  truth  the 
persecuting  spirit  was  responsible  for  the  dogma, 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance  3 

not  the  dogma  for  persecution.  And  we  must 
look  for  the  underlying  cause  of  the  whole  evil 
in  the  premature  union  of  metaphysics  with 
religion  and  morality  first  effected  by  Plato,  or 
rather  by  the  genius  of  Athens  working  through 
Plato.  Indeed,  on  a  closer  examination  we  shall 
find  that  the  slowing-down  of  speculation  had 
begun  long  before  the  advent  of  Christianity, 
and  coincides  with  the  establishment  of  its 
headquarters  at  Athens,  where  also  the  first  per- 
manent schools  of  philosophy  were  established. 
These  schools  were  distinctly  religious  in  their 
character;  and  none  was  so  set  against  innova- 
tion as  that  of  Epicurus,  falsely  supposed  to  have 
been  a  home  of  free  thought.  In  the  last  Greek 
system  of  philosophy,  Neo-Platonism,  theology 
reigned  supreme;  and  during  the  two  and  a  half 
centuries  of  its  existence  no  real  advance  on  the 
teaching  of  Plotinus  was  made. 

Neo-Platonism  when  first  constituted  had 
incorporated  a  large  Aristotelian  element, 
the  expulsion  of  which  had  been  accomplished 
by  its  last  great  master,  Proclus ;  and  Christen- 
dom took  over  metaphysics  under  what  seemed  a 
Platonic  form — the  more  welcome  as  Plato 
passed  for  giving  its  creeds  the  independent 
support  of  pure  reason.  This  support  extend- 
ed beyond  a  future  ;life  and  went  down  to 
the  deepest  mysteries  of  revealed  faith.  For, 
according  to  the  Platonic  doctrine  of  ideas,  it 


4  Modern  Philosophy 

was  quite  in  order  that  there  should  be  a  divine 
unity  existing  independently  of  the  three  divine 
persons  composing  it;  that  the  idea  of  hu- 
manity should  be  combined  with  one  of  these 
persons;  and  that  the  same  idea,  being  both  one 
with  and  distinct  from  Adam,  should  involve  all 
mankind  in  the  guilt  of  his  transgression.  Thus 
the  Church  started  with  a  strong  prejudice  in 
favour  of  Plato  which  continued  to  operate  for 
many  centuries,  although  the  first  great  school- 
man, John  Scotus  Erigena  (810-877),  in- 
curred a  condemnation  for  heresy  by  adopting 
the  pantheistic  metaphysics  of  Neo-Platonism. 

As  the  Platonic  doctrine  of  ideas  came  to  life 
again  in  the  realism,  as  it  was  called,  of  scholastic 
philosophy,  so  the  conflicting  view  of  his  old 
opponent  Aristotle  was  revived  under  the  form  of 
conceptualism.  According  to  this  theory  the 
genera  and  species  of  the  objective  world  cor- 
respond to  real  and  permanent  distinctions  in 
the  nature  of  things;  but,  apart  from  the  con- 
ceptions by  which  they  are  represented  in  the 
intellect  of  God  and  man,  those  distinctions 
have  no  separate  existence.  Aristotle's  philo- 
sophy was  first  brought  into  Europe  by  the 
Mohammedan  conquerors  of  Spain,  which  be- 
came an  important  centre  of  learning  in  the 
earlier  Middle  Ages.  Not  a  few  Christian 
scholars  went  there  to  study.  Latin  translations 
were  made  from  Arabic  versions  of  Aristotle, 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance  5 

and  in  this  way  his  doctrines  became  more  widely 
known  to  the  lecture-rooms  of  the  Catholic 
world.  But  their  derivation  from  infidel  sources 
roused  a  prejudice  against  them,  still  further 
heightened  by  the  circumstance  that  an  Arabian 
commentator,  Averroes,  had  interpreted  the 
theology  of  the  Metaphysics  in  a  pantheistic  sense. 
And  on  any  sincere  reading  Aristotle  denied  the 
soul's  immortality  which  Plato  had  upheld.  Ac- 
cordingly, all  through  the  twelfth  century,  Pla- 
tonism  still  dominated  religious  thought,  and  even 
so  late  as  the  early  thirteenth  century  the  study 
of  Aristotle  was  still  condemned  by  the  Church. 
Nevertheless  a  great  revolution  was  already  in 
progress.  As  a  result  of  the  capture  of  Con- 
stantinople by  the  Crusaders,  in  A.D.  1204,  the 
Greek  manuscripts  of  Aristotle's  writings  were 
brought  to  Paris,  and  at  a  subsequent  period 
they  were  translated  into  Latin  under  the  di- 
rection of  St.  Thomas  Aquinas,  the  ablest  of  the 
schoolmen,  who  so  manipulated  the  Peripatetic 
philosophy  as  to  convert  it  from  a  battering-ram 
into  a  buttress  of  Catholic  theology — a  position 
still  officially  assigned  to  it  at  the  present  day. 
Aristotelianism,  however,  did  not  reign  with- 
out a  rival  even  in  the  later  Middle  Ages. 
Aquinas  was  a  Dominican;  and  the  jealousy  of 
the  competing  Franciscan  Order  found  expression 
in  maintaining  a  certain  tradition  of  Platonism, 
represented  in  different  ways  by  Roger  Bacon 


6  Modern  Philosophy 

(1214-1294)  and  by  Duns  Scotus  (1265-1308). 
In  this  connection  we  have  to  note  the  extra- 
ordinary fertility  of  the  British  islands  in  eminent 
thinkers  during  the  Middle  Ages.  Besides  the 
two  last  mentioned  there  is  Erigena  ("born  in 
Ireland "),  John  of  Salisbury  (1115-1180),  the 
first  Humanist,  William  of  Ockham,  and  Wycliffe 
the  first  reformer — making  six  in  all,  a  larger 
contribution  than  any  other  region  of  Europe, 
or  indeed  all  the  rest  of  Europe  put  together,  has 
made  to  the  stars  of  Scholasticism.  This  ad- 
vantage is  probably  not  due  to  any  inherent 
genius  for  philosophy  in  the  inhabitants  of  these 
islands,  but  to  their  relative  immunity  from  war 
and  to  the  political  liberty  that  cannot  but  have 
been  favourable  to  independent  thought.  Five 
out  of  the  six  were  more  or  less  inclined  to  Platon- 
ism,  and  their  idealist  or  mystical  tendencies 
were  sometimes  associated  with  the  same  practi- 
cality that  distinguished  their  master.  The  sixth, 
commonly  called  Occam  (died  about  1349),  is 
famous  as  the  champion  of  Nominalism — that  is, 
of  the  doctrine  that  genera  and  species  have  no 
real  existence  either  in  nature  or  in  mind ;  there 
are  only  individuals  more  or  less  resembling  one 
another.  He  is  the  author  of  the  famous  saying 
— the  sole  legacy  of  Scholasticism  to  common 
thought:  "Entities  ought  not  to  be  gratuitously 
multiplied"  (entia  non  sunt  prater  necessitate™, 
multipUcanda) . 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance  7 

The  capture  of  Constantinople  by  the  Cru- 
saders had  led  to  Aristotle's  triumph  in  the  thir- 
teenth century.  Two  hundred  years  later  the 
conquering  Ottoman  advance  on  the  same  city 
was  the  immediate  cause  of  his  overthrow.  For 
the  Byzantine  scholars  who  fled  for  help  and  re- 
fuge to  Italy  brought  with  them  the  manuscripts 
of  Plato  and  Plotinus,  and  these  soon  became 
known  to  Western  Europe  through  the  Latin 
translations  of  Marsilio  Ficino.  On  its  literary 
side  the  Platonic  revival  fell  in  admirably  with 
the  Humanism  which  to  the  schoolmen  had 
long  been  intensely  distasteful.  And  the  re- 
ligious movement  that  preceded  Luther's  Re- 
formation found  a  welcome  ally  in  Neo-Platonic 
mysticism.  At  the  same  time  the  invention  of 
printing,  by  opening  the  world  of  books  to  non- 
academic  readers,  vastly  widened  the  possibilities 
of  independent  thought.  And  the  Reformation, 
by  discrediting  the  scholastic  theology  in 
Northern  Europe,  dealt  another  blow  at  the 
system  with  which  it  had  been  associated  by 
Aquinas. 

It  has  been  supposed  that  the  discovery  of 
America  and  the  circumnavigation  of  the  globe 
contributed  also  to  the  impending  philosophical 
revolution.  But  the  true  theory  of  the  earth's 
figure  formed  the  very  foundation  of  Aristotle's 
cosmology,  and  was  as  well  known  to  Dante  as 
to  ourselves.  Made  by  a  fervent  Catholic,  act- 


8  Modern  Philosophy 

ing  under  the  patronage  of  the  Catholic  queen 
par  excellence,  the  discovery  of  Columbus  in- 
creased the  prestige  of  Catholicism  by  opening  a 
new  world  to  its  missions  and  adding  to  the 
wealth  of  its  supporters  in  the  Old  World. 

The  decisive  blow  to  medieval  ideas  came  from 
another  quarter — from  the  Copernican  astron- 
omy. What  the  true  theory  of  the  earth's  motion 
meant  for  philosophy  has  not  always  been  rightly 
understood.  It  seems  to  be  commonly  supposed 
that  the  heliocentric  system  excited  hostility 
because  it  degraded  the  earth  from  her  proud 
position  as  centre  of  the  universe.  But  the 
reverse  is  true.  According  to  Aristotle  and  his 
scholastic  followers,  the  centre  of  the  universe 
is  the  lowest  and  least  honourable,  the  circum- 
ference the  highest  and  most  distinguished 
position  in  it.  And  that  is  why  earth,  as  the 
vilest  of  the  four  elements,  tends  to  the  centre; 
while  fire,  being  the  most  precious,  flies  upward. 

Again,  the  incorruptible  aether  of  which  the 
heavens  are  composed  shows  its  eternal  character 
by  moving  for  ever  round  in  a  circle  of  which 
God,  as  Prime  Mover,  occupies  the  outermost 
verge.  And  this  metaphysical  topography  is 
faithfully  followed  by  Dante,  who  even  improves 
on  it  by  placing  the  worst  criminals  (that  is,  the 
rebels  and  traitors — Satan,  with  Judas  and 
Brutus  and  Cassius)  in  the  eternal  ice  at  the  very 
centre  of  the  earth.  Such  fancies  were  incom- 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance  9 

patible  with  the  new  astronomy.  No  longer 
cold  and  dead,  our  earth  might  henceforth  take 
her  place  among  the  stars,  animated  like  them — • 
if  animated  they  were — and  suggesting  by  ana- 
logy that  they  too  supported  teeming  multitudes 
of  reasonable  inhabitants. 

But  the  transposition  of  values  did  not  end 
here.  Aristotle's  whole  philosophy  had  been 
based  on  a  radical  antithesis  between  the  sub- 
lunary and  the  superlunary  spheres — the  world 
of  growth,  decay,  vicissitude,  and  the  world  of 
everlasting  realities.  In  the  sublunary  sphere, 
also,  it  distinguished  sharply  between  the  Forms 
of  things,  which  were  eternal,  and  the  Matter 
on  which  they  were  imposed,  an  intangible, 
evanescent  thing  related  to  Form  as  Possibility 
to  Actuality.  We  know  that  these  two  con- 
venient categories  are  logically  independent  of 
the  false  cosmology  that  may  or  may  not  have 
suggested  their  world- wide  application.  But 
the  immediate  effect  of  having  it  denied,  or  even 
doubted,  was  greatly  to  exalt  the  credit  of  Matter 
or  Power  at  the  expense  of  Form  or  Act. 

The  first  to  draw  these  revolutionary  in- 
ferences from  the  Copernican  theory  was 
Giordano  Bruno  (1548-1600).  Born  at  Nola,  a 
south  Italian  city  not  far  from  Naples,  Bruno 
entered  the  Dominican  Order  before  the  age  of 
fifteen,  and  on  that  occasion  exchanged  his 
baptismal  name  of  Filippo  for  that  by  which  he 


io  Modern  Philosophy 

has  ever  since  been  known.  Here  he  became 
acquainted  with  the  whole  of  ancient  and 
mediaeval  philosophy,  besides  the  Copernican 
astronomy,  then  not  yet  condemned  by  the 
Church.  At  the  early  age  of  eighteen  he  first 
came  into  collision  with  the  authorities ;  and  at 
twenty-eight  (1576)  [Mclntyre,  pp.  9-10]  he 
openly  questioned  the  chief  characteristic  dog- 
mas of  Catholicism,  was  menaced  with  an  action 
for  heresy,  and  fled  from  the  convent.  The  pur- 
suit must  have  been  rather  perfunctory,  for 
Bruno  found  himself  free  to  spend  two  years 
wandering  from  one  Italian  city  to  another, 
earning  a  precarious  livelihood  by  tuition  and 
authorship.  Leaving  Italy  at  last,  rather  from 
a  desire  to  push  his  fortunes  abroad  than  from 
any  fear  of  molestation,  and  finding  France  too 
hot  to  hold  him,  he  tried  Geneva  for  a  little 
while,  but,  on  being  given  to  understand  that  he 
could  stay  only  on  the  condition  of  embracing 
Calvinism,  returned  to  France,  where  he  lived 
first  for  two  years  as  Professor  of  Philosophy  at 
Toulouse,  and  three  more  in  a  somewhat  less 
official  position  at  Paris.  Thence,  in  the  train 
of  the  French  ambassador,  he  passed  to  England, 
where  his  two  years'  sojourn  seems  to  have  been 
the  happiest  and  most  fruitful  period  of  his 
restless  career.  It  was  cut  short  by  his  chief's 
return  to  Paris.  But  the  philosopher's  fearless 
advocacy  of  Copernicanism  made  that  bigoted 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         n 

capital  impossible.  The  truth,  however,  seems  to 
be  that  Bruno  never  could  hit  it  off  with  any  one 
or  any  society;  and  the  next  five  years,  spent  in 
trying  to  make  himself  acceptable  at  one  German 
university  after  another,  are  a  record  of  hopeless 
failure.  Finally,  in  an  evil  hour,  he  goes  to 
Venice  at  the  invitation  of  a  young  noble, 
Mocenigo,  who,  in  revenge  for  disappointed 
expectations,  betrays  him  to  the  Inquisition. 
Questioned  about  his  heresies,  Bruno  showed 
perfect  willingness  to  accept  all  the  theological 
dogmas  that  he  had  formerly  denied.  Whether 
he  withdrew  his  retractation  on  being  transferred 
from  a  Venetian  to  a  Roman  prison  does  not  ap- 
pear, as  the  Roman  depositions  are  not  forthcom- 
ing. Neither  is  it  clear  why  so  long  a  delay  as  six 
years  (1594-1600)  was  granted  to  the  philosopher 
when  such  short  work  was  made  of  other  heretics. 
It  seems  most  probable  that  Bruno,  while  pliant 
enough  on  questions  of  religious  belief,  remained 
inflexible  in  maintaining  the  infinity  of  inhabited 
worlds.  When  the  final  condemnation  was  read 
out,  he  told  the  judges  that  he  heard  it  with  less 
fear  than  they  felt  in  pronouncing  it.  In  the 
customary  euphemistic  terms  they  had  sent  him 
to  death  by  fire.  At  the  stake,  when  the  crucifix 
was  held  up  to  him,  he  turned  away  his  eyes — 
with  what  thoughts  we  cannot  tell.  There  is  a 
monument  to  the  heroic  thinker  at  Nola,  and  an- 
other in  the  Campo  dei  Fiori  on  the  spot  where 


12  Modern  Philosophy 

he  suffered  at  Rome,  raised  against  the  strongest 
protests  of  the  ecclesiastical  authorities. 

The  Greek-Italian  philosophers — the  Pytha- 
goreans and  Parmenides — had  introduced  the 
idea  of  finiteness  or  Limitation  as  a  necessary 
condition  of  reality  and  perfection  into  thought. 
From  them  it  passed  over  to  Plato  and  Aristotle, 
who  made  it  dominant  in  the  ^schools.  Epicurus 
and  Lucretius  had,  indeed,  carried  on  the  older 
Ionian  tradition  of  infinite  atoms  and  infinite 
worlds  dispersed  through  infinite  space;  but 
their  philosophy  was  practically  atheistic,  and 
the  Church  condemned  it  as  both  heretical  and 
false.  Probably  the  discovery  of  the  earth's 
globular  shape  had  first  suggested  the  idea  of  a 
finite  universe  to  Parmenides;  at  any  rate,  the 
discovery  of  the  earth's  motion  suggested  the 
idea  of  an  infinite  universe  to  his  Greek-souled 
Italian  successor;  or  rather  it  was  the  break-up 
of  Aristotle's  spherical  world  by  Copernicanism 
that  threw  Bruno  back — as  he  gives  us  himself 
to  understand — on  the  older  Ionian  cosmolo- 
gies, with  their  assumption  of  infinite  space  and 
infinite  worlds.  In  this  reference  Bruno  went 
far  beyond  Copernicus,  and  even  Kepler;  for 
both  had  assumed,  in  deference  to  current  opin- 
ion, that  the  fixed  stars  were  equidistant  from 
the  solar  system,  and  formed  a  single  sphere  en- 
closing it  on  all  sides.  He,  on  the  contrary, 
anticipated  modern  astronomy  in  conceiving  the 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         13 

stars  as  so  many  suns  dispersed  without  assign- 
able limits  through  space,  and  each  surrounded 
by  inhabited  planets. 

Infinite  space  had  been  closely  associated  by 
Democritus  and  Epicurus  with  infinite  atoms; 
and  the  next  great  step  taken  by  Bruno  was  to 
rehabilitate  atomism  as  a  necessary  concept  of 
modern  science.  He  figured  the  atoms  as  very 
minute  spheres  of  solid  earthy  matter,  forming 
by  their  combinations  the  framework  of  visible 
bodies.  But  their  combinations  are  by  no  means 
fortuitous,  as  Democritus  had  impiously  sup- 
posed; nor  do  they  move  through  an  absolute 
void.  All  space  is  filled  with  an  ocean  of  liquid 
aether,  which  is  no  other  than  the  quintessence  of 
which  Aristotle's  celestial  spheres  were  composed. 
Only  in  Bruno's  system  it  takes  the  place  of  that 
First  Matter  which  is  the  extreme  antithesis  of 
the  disembodied  Form  personified  in  the  Prime 
Mover,  God.  And  here  we  come  to  that  re- 
versal of  cosmic  values  brought  about  by  the 
reversal  of  the  relations  between  the  earth  and 
sun  which  Copernicus  had  effected.  The  pri- 
mordial Matter,  so  far  from  passively  receiving 
the  Forms  imposed  on  it  from  without,  has  an 
infinite  capacity  for  evolving  Forms  from  its  own 
bosom;  and,  so  far  from  being  unspiritual,  is 
itself  the  universal  spirit,  the  creative  and 
animating  soul  of  the  world.  The  First  Matter, 
Form,  Energy,  Life,  and  Reason  are  identified 


14  Modern  Philosophy 

with  Nature,  Nature  with  the  Universe,  and  the 
Universe  with  God. 

So  far  all  is  clear,  if  not  convincing.  It  is 
otherwise  with  the  theory  of  Monads.  This  is 
expounded  only  in  Bruno's  Latin  works,  for  the 
most  part  ill- written  and  hopelessly  obscure. 
It  seems  possible  that  by  the  monads  Bruno 
sometimes  means  the  infinitesimal  parts  into 
which  the  aether  of  space  may  conceivably  be 
divided.  Each  of  these  possesses  conscious- 
ness, and  therefore  may  be  considered  as  re- 
flecting and  representing  the  whole  universe. 
A  number  of  monads,  or  rather  a  continuous 
portion  of  the  aether  surrounding  and  interpene- 
trating a  group  of  atoms,  endows  them  with  the 
forms  and  qualities  of  elementary  bodies,  as- 
cending gradually  through  vegetal  and  animal 
organisations  to  human  beings.  But  the  ani- 
mating process  does  not  stop  with  man.  The 
earth,  with  the  other  planets,  the  sun,  and  all  the 
stars,  are  also  monads  on  the  largest  scale,  with 
reasonable  souls,  just  as  Aristotle  thought..  In 
fact,  the  old  mythology  whence  he  derived  the 
idea  repeats  itself  in  his  great  enemy  Bruno. 

Beyond  and  above  all  these  partial  unities  is 
the  Monas  Monadum — the  supreme  unity,  the 
infinite  God  who  is  the  soul  of  the  infinite  uni- 
verse. Doubtless  there  is  here  a  reminiscence  of 
the  Neo-Platonic  One,  the  ineffable  Absolute, 
beyond  all  existence,  yet  endowed  with  the  in- 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         15 

finite  power  whence  all  existence  proceeds. 
Bruno  had  learned  from  Cardinal  Nicolas  of 
Cusa — a  Copernican  before  Copernicus — to  re- 
cognise the  principle  of  Heracleitus  that  oppo- 
sites  are  one;  and  in  this  instance  he  applies 
it  with  brilliant  audacity;  for  every  infinitesi- 
mal part  of  the  space-filling  aether  is  no  less  the 
soul  of  the  universe  than  the  Monad  of  Monads 
itself.  And  both  agree  in  being  non-existent  in 
the  sense  of  being  transfinite,  since  there  can  be 
no  sum  of  infinity  and  no  animated  mathe- 
matical points. 

From  Anaximander  to  Plotinus  there  is  hardly 
a  great  Greek  thinker  whose  influence  cannot  be 
traced  in  the  system  of  Giordano  Bruno.  And 
while  he  represents  the  philosophical  Renaissance 
in  this  eminent  degree,  he  heads  the  two  lines  of 
speculation  which,  separately  or  combined,  run 
through  the  whole  history  of  modern  metaphysics 
— the  monistic,  and  what  is  now  called  the 
pluralistic,  tendency.  With  none,  except,  per- 
haps, with  Hegel,  have  the  two  been  perfectly 
balanced;  and  in  Bruno  himself  the  leaning  is 
distinctly  towards  plurality,  his  Supreme  Monad 
being  a  mere  survival  from  the  Neo-Platonic  One. 

Francis  Bacon 

Francis  Bacon  (1561-1626)  was  by  profession 
a  lawyer,  by  taste  a  scientific  inquirer,  by  char- 


1 6  Modern  Philosophy 

acter  a  seeker  after  wealth  and  power,  by  natural 
genius  an  immortal  master  of  words.  He  be- 
gan life  as  the  friend,  adviser,  and  client  of 
Elizabeth's  favourite,  the  Earl  of  Essex.  When 
that  unfortunate  courtier,  in  disregard  of  his 
warnings,  rushed  into  a  treasonable  enterprise, 
Bacon  appeared  as  one  of  the  most  zealous  of  the 
counsel  for  the  prosecution.  Strictly  speaking, 
this  may  have  been  his  duty  as  a  loyal  subject  of 
the  Queen ;  it  was  hardly  his  duty,  even  on  the 
Queen's  commission,  after  Essex's  execution,  to 
assist  in  the  composition  of  a  pamphlet  blacken- 
ing the  memory  of  his  former  friend  and  patron. 
In  the  next  reign  Bacon  paid  assiduous  court 
to  James  and  his  favourites. 

When  the  first  of  these,  Somerset,  fell  and  was 
tried  on  a  charge  of  murder,  he  conducted  the 
prosecution,  and,  finding  the  evidence  insuf- 
ficient, suggested  to  James  that  the  prisoner 
should  be  entrapped  into  a  confession  by  dan- 
gling a  false  promise  of  forgiveness  before  his 
eyes.  Bacon  owed  his  final  exaltation  to  Buck- 
ingham, and  as  Lord  Keeper  allowed  himself  to  be 
made  the  tool  of  that  bad  man  for  the  perversion 
of  justice.  A  suit  was  brought  before  him  by  a 
young  man  against  a  fraudulent  trustee  (his  own 
uncle)  for  the  restitution  of  a  sum  of  money. 
Bacon  gave  sentence  for  the  plaintiff.  Bucking- 
ham then  intervened  with  a  demand  that  the  case 
should  be  retried.  ' '  Upon  this  Bacon  saw  the  par- 


FRANCIS  BACON 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         17 

ties  privately,  and,  annulling  all  the  deliberate 
decisions  of  the  Court,  compelled  the  youth  to 
assent  to  the  ceasing  of  all  proceedings,  and  to 
accept "  a  smaller  sum  than  he  was  entitled  to  (E. 
A.  Abbott).  On  another  occasion  he  exercised 
his  judicial  authority  in  a  way  that  did  not 
square  with  Buckingham's  wishes,  but  quite  legi- 
timately and  without  any  consciousness  of  giving 
offence;  whereupon  the  insolent  favourite  ad- 
dressed him  in  a  letter  filled  with  outrageous 
abuse,  to  which  Bacon  replied  in  terms  of  abject 
submission.  This  meanness  had  its  reward,  for 
in  1618  the  philosopher  became  Lord  Chancellor. 
After  a  three  years'  tenure,  Bacon  was  flung 
from  his  high  position  by  a  charge  of  judicial 
corruption,  to  the  truth  of  every  count  in  which 
he  confessed.  The  question  is  very  complicated, 
obscure,  and  much  controverted,  not  admitting 
of  discussion  within  the  limits  here  assigned.  On 
the  subject  of  Bacon's  truthfulness,  however,  a 
word  must  be  said.  The  Chancellor  admitted 
having  taken  presents  from  suitors,  but  denied 
having  ever  let  his  judgments  be  influenced  there- 
by; and  his  word  seems  to  be  generally  accepted 
as  a  sufficient  exoneration.  But  its  value  may 
be  doubted  in  view  of  two  statements  quoted  by 
Dean  Church.  Of  these  "one  was  made  in  the 
House  of  Commons  by  Sir  George  Hastings,  a 
member  of  the  House,  who  had  been  the  channel 
of  Awbry's  gift  [made  to  the  Chancellor  pendente 


1 8  Modern  Philosophy 

lite],  that  when  he  had  told  Bacon  that  if  ques- 
tioned he  must  admit  it,  Bacon's  answer  was: 
'George,  if  you  do  so,  I  must  deny  it,  upon  my 
honour — upon  my  oath/  The  other  was  that 
he  had  given  an  opinion  in  favour  of  some  claim 
of  the  Masters  in  Chancery,  for  which  he  re- 
ceived £1200,  and  with  which  he  said  that  all 
the  judges  agreed — -an  assertion  which  all  the 
judges  denied.  Of  these  charges  there  is  no 
contradiction. "  The  denial  of  Bacon  that  he 
ever  allowed  his  judgments  to  be  influenced  by 
bribes,  and  his  assertion  that  he  was  the  justest 
judge  since  his  own  father,  cannot,  then,  count 
for  much.  As  to  the  plea  that  the  justice  of  his 
sentences  was  never  challenged,  who  was  to 
challenge  it?  The  successful  suitor  would  hold 
his  tongue;  and  the  unsuccessful  suitor  could 
hardly  be  expected  to  complete  his  own  ruin  by 
going  to  law  again  on  the  strength  of  the  Chan- 
cellor's condemnation. 

Bacon,  at  any  rate,  knew  quite  well  that  to 
take  presents  before  judgment  was  wrong  and 
criminal,  as  his  answer  to  Egerton  sufficiently 
shows — an  answer  which  also  fully  disposes  of  the 
plea  that  to  take  such  presents  was  the  common 
custom  of  the  age.  Moreover  had  such  been  the 
common  custom,  Bacon  might  have  taken  his 
trial  and  pleaded  it  as  a  sufficient  apology  or  ex- 
tenuation for  his  own  conduct.  This  would  have 
been  a  somewhat  more  dignified  course  than  the 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         19 

one  he  actually  pursued,  which  was  to  plead  guilty 
to  all  the  charges,  throwing  himself  on  the  mercy 
of  the  Lords.  It  has  been  suggested  that  he  did 
this  at  the  desire  of  his  powerful  patrons,  .whose 
malpractices  might  have  been  brought  to  light 
by  a  public  investigation.  As  his  punishment 
was  immediately  remitted,  some  arrangement 
with  the  King  and  Buckingham  seems  probable. 
But  for  an  innocent  man  to  have  saved  himself 
by  a  false  acknowledgment  of  guilt  would,  as 
Macaulay  shows,  have  been  still  more  infamous 
than  to  take  bribes. 

The  desperate  efforts  of  some  apologists  to 
whitewash  Bacon  are  apparently  due  to  a  very 
exaggerated  estimate  of  his  services  to  mankind. 
Other  critics  give  themselves  the  pleasure  of 
painting  what  has  been  called  a  Rembrandt 
portrait,  with  noon  on  the  forehead  and  night  at 
the  heart.  And  a  third  class  argue  from  a  rotten 
morality  to  a  rotten  intelligence.  In  fact,  Bacon 
as  little  deserves  to  be  called  the  wisest  and 
greatest  as  the  meanest  of  mankind.  He  really 
loved  humanity,  and  tried  hard  to  serve  it,  de- 
voting a  truly  philosophical  intellect  to  that  end. 
The  service  was  to  consist  in  an  immense  ex- 
tension of  man's  power  over  nature,  to  be  ob- 
tained by  a  complete  knowledge  of  her  secrets; 
and  this  knowledge  he  hoped  to  win  by  reform- 
ing the  methods  of  scientific  investigation. 
Unfortunately,  intellect  alone  proved  unequal  to 


20  Modern  Philosophy 

that  mighty  task.  Bacon  passes,  and  not  with- 
out good  grounds,  for  a  great  upholder  of 
the  principle  that  truth  can  be  learned  only 
by  experience.  But  his  philosophy  starts 
by  setting  that  principle  at  defiance.  He 
who  took  all  knowledge  for  his  province 
omitted  from  his  survey  the  rather  important 
subject  of  knowledge  itself,  its  limits  and  its 
laws.  Had  his  attention  been  drawn  that  way, 
the  very  first  requisite,  on  empirical  principles, 
would  have  been  to  take  stock  of  the  leading 
truths  already  ascertained.  But  the  enormous 
vanity  of  the  amateur  reformer  seems  to  have 
persuaded  him  that  these  amounted  to  little  or 
nothing.  The  later  Renaissance  was  an  age  of 
intense  scientific  activity,  conditioned,  in  the 
first  instance,  by  a  revival  of  Greek  learning. 
Already  before  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth 
century  great  advance  had  been  made  in  algebra, 
trigonometry,  astronomy,  mineralogy,  botany, 
anatomy,  and  physiology.  Before  the  publication 
of  the  Novum  Organum  Napier  had  invented  loga- 
rithms, Galileo  was  reconstituting  physics,  Gil- 
bert had  created  the  science  of  magnetism,  and 
Harvey  had  discovered  the  circulation  of  the 
blood.  These  were  facts  that  Bacon  took  no 
pains  to  study;  he  either  ignores  or  slights  or 
denies  the  work  done  by  his  illustrious  predeces- 
sors and  contemporaries.  That  he  rejected  the 
Copernican  theory  with  scorn  is  an  exaggeration ; 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         21 

but  he  never  accepted  it,  notwithstanding  argu- 
ments that  the  best  astronomers  of  his  time 
found  convincing;  and  the  longer  he  lived  the 
more  unfavourable  became  his  opinion  of  its 
merits.  And  it  is  certain  that  Tycho  Brahe's 
wonderful  mass  of  observations,  with  the  splendid 
generalisations  based  on  them  by  Kepler,  are 
never  mentioned  in  his  writings.  Now  what 
really  ruined  Aristotelianism  was  the  heliocentric 
astronomy,  as  Bruno  perfectly  saw;  and  ignor- 
ance of  this  left  Bacon  after  all  in  the  bonds  of 
mediaeval  philosophy. 

We  have  seen  in  studying  Bruno  that  the  very 
soul  of  Aristotle's  system  was  his  distinction  be- 
tween form  and  matter,  and  this  distinction 
Bacon  accepted,  without  examination,  from 
Scholasticism.  The  purpose  of  his  life  was  to 
ascertain  by  what  combination  of  forms  each 
particular  body  was  constituted,  and  then,  by 
artificially  superinducing  them  on  some  portion 
of  matter,  to  call  the  desired  substance  into 
existence.  His  celebrated  inductive  method  was 
devised  as  a  means  to  that  end.  To  discover  the 
forms  "we  are  instructed  first  to  draw  up  ex- 
haustive tables  of  the  phenomena  and  forms 
under  investigation,  and  then  to  exclude  from 
our  list  any  'form*  which  does  not  invariably 
co-exist  with  the  phenomenon  of  which  the 
form  is  sought.  For  example,  if  we  are  trying  to 
discover  the  form  of  heat  it  will  not  do  to  adduce 


22  Modern  Philosophy 

'celestial  nature';  for,  though  the  sun's  light  is 
hot,  that  of  the  moon  is  cold.  After  a  series  of 
such  exclusions,  Bacon  believed  that  a  single 
form  would  finally  remain  to  be  the  invariable 
cause  of  the  phenomenon  investigated,  and  of 
nothing  else"  (P.  C.  S.  Schiller). 

As  Dr.  Schiller  observes,  this  method  of  ex- 
clusions is  not  new;  nor,  indeed,  does  Bacon 
claim  to  have  originated  it;  at  least  he  observes 
in  his  Novum  Organum  that  it  had  been  already 
employed  by  Plato  to  a  certain  extent  for  the  pur- 
pose of  discussing  definitions  and  ideas.  And 
elsewhere  he  praises  Plato  as  "a  man  (and  one 
that  surveyed  all  things  from  a  lofty  cliff)  for 
having  discerned  in  his  doctrine  of  Ideas  that 
Forms  were  the  true  object  of  knowledge;  how- 
soever he  lost  the  fruit  of  this  most  true  opinion 
by  considering  and  trying  to  apprehend  Forms 
as  absolutely  abstracted  from  matter,  whence  it 
came  that  he  turned  aside  to  theological  specu- 
lations/' Bacon  must  have  known  that  this 
reproach  does  not  apply  to  Aristotle ;  as,  indeed, 
the  very  schoolmen  knew  that  he  did  not — except 
in  the  single  case  of  God — give  Forms  a  separate 
existence.  But,  probably  from  jealousy,  he 
specially  hated  Aristotle,  and  in  this  particular 
instance  the  Stagirite  more  particularly  excited 
his  hostility  by  identifying  Forms  with  Final 
Causes.  These  Bacon  rather  contemptuously 
handed  over  to  the  sole  cognisance  of  theology 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         23 

as  consecrated  virgins  bearing  no  fruit.  As  a 
point  of  scientific  method  this  condemnation  of 
teleology  is  quite  unjustified  even  in  the  eyes 
of  inquirers  who  reject  the  theological  argument 
from  design.  To  a  Darwinian,  purpose  means 
survival  value,  and  the  parts  of  an  organism  are 
so  many  utilities  evolved  in  the  action  and 
reaction  between  living  beings  and  their  en- 
vironment. But  Bacon  disliked  any  theory 
tending  to  glorify  the  existing  arrangements  of 
nature  as  perfect  and  unalterable  achievements, 
for  the  good  reason  that  it  threatened  to  dis- 
countenance his  own  scheme  for  practically 
creating  the  world  over  again  with  exclusive 
reference  to  the  good  of  humanity.  Thus  in  his 
Utopia,  the  New  Atlantis,  there  are  artificial 
mines,  producing  artificial  metals,  plants  raised 
without  seeds ,  contrivances  for  turning  one  tree 
or  plant  into  another,  for  prolonging  the  lives  of 
animals  after  the  removal  of  particular  organs,  for 
making  "a  number  of  kinds  of  serpents,  worms, 
flies,  fishes  of  putrefaction;  whereof  some  are 
advanced  to  be  perfect  creatures  like  beasts  or 
birds";  with  flying-machines,  submarines,  and 
perpetual  motions — in  short,  a  general  antici- 
pation of  Jules  Verne  and  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells. 

Such  dreams,  however,  do  not  entitle  Bacon  to 
be  regarded  as  a  true  prophet  of  modern  science 
and  modern  mechanical  inventions.  In  them- 
selves his  ideas  do  not  go  beyond  the  magic  of  the 


24  Modern  Philosophy 

Middle  Ages,  or  rather  of  all  ages.  The  original 
thing  was  his  Method;  and  this  Method,  con- 
sidered as  a  means  for  surprising  the  secrets  of 
nature,  we  know  to  be  completely  chimerical, 
because  there  are  no  such  Forms  as  he  imagined 
to  be  enucleated  by  induction,  with  or  without 
the  Method  of  Exclusion.  The  truth  is  that  the 
inductive  method  which  he  borrowed  from  Socra- 
tes and  Plato  was  originally  created  by  Athenian 
philosophy  for  the  humanistic  studies  of  law, 
morality,  aesthetics,  and  psychology.  Physical 
science,  on  the  other  hand,  should  be  approached, 
as  the  Greeks  rightly  felt,  through  the  door  of 
mathematics,  an  instrument  of  whose  potency 
the  great  Chancellor  notoriously  had  no  concep- 
tion. Thus  his  prodigious  powers  would  have 
been  much  more  usefully  devoted  to  moral  philo- 
sophy. As  it  is,  the  Essays  alone  remain  to 
show  what  great  things  he  might  have  done  by 
limiting  himself  to  the  subjects  with  which  they 
deal.  The  famous  logical  and  physical  treatises, 
the  Novum  Organum  and  the  De  Augmentis,  not- 
withstanding their  wealth  and  splendour  of  lan- 
guage, are  to  us  at  the  present  day  less  living  than 
the  fragments  of  early  Greek  thought,  than  most 
of  Plato,  than  much  of  Aristotle,  than  Atomism 
as  expounded  by  Lucretius. 

Macaulay  rests  his  claim  of  the  highest  place 
among  philosophers  for  Bacon  not  on  his  in- 
ductive theory,  to  which  the  historian  rightly 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         25 

denies  any  novelty,  but  on  the  new  purpose 
and  direction  that  the  search  for  knowledge  is 
assumed  to  have  received  from  his  teaching. 
On  this  view  the  whole  of  modern  science  has 
been  created  by  the  desire  to  convert  nature 
into  an  instrument  for  the  satisfaction  of  human 
wants — an  ambition  dating  from  the  publication 
of  the  Novum  Organum.  The  claim  will  not 
stand,  for  two  reasons.  The  first  is  that  the 
great  movement  of  modern  science  began  at  least 
half  a  century  before  Bacon's  birth,  growing 
rapidly  during  his  life,  but  without  his  knowledge, 
and  continuing  its  course  without  being  percept- 
ibly accelerated  by  his  intervention  ever  since. 
The  one  man  of  science  who  most  commonly 
passes  for  his  disciple  is  Robert  Boyle  (1627- 
1691).  But  Boyle  did  not  read  the  Novum 
Organum  before  he  was  thirty,  whereas,  residing 
at  Florence  before  fifteen,  he  received  a  power- 
ful stimulus  from  the  study  of  Galileo.  And  his 
chemistry  was  based  on  the  atomic  theory  which 
Bacon  rejected. 

The  second  reason  for  not  accepting  Ma- 
caulay's  claim  is  that  in  modern  Europe  no  less 
than  in  ancient  Greece  the  great  advances  in 
science  have  been  made  only  by  those  who  loved 
knowledge  for  its  own  sake,  or,  if  the  expression 
be  preferred,  simply  for  the  gratification  of  their 
intellectual  curiosity.  No  doubt  their  discoveries 
have  added  enormously  to  the  utilities  of  life; 


26  Modern  Philosophy 

but  such  advantages  have  been  gained  on  the 
sole  condition  of  not  making  them  the  primary 
end  in  view.  The  labours  of  Bacon's  own  con- 
temporaries, Kepler  and  Gilbert,  have  led  to  the. 
navigation  of  the  sea  by  lunar  distances,  and  to 
the  various  industrial  applications  of  electro- 
magnetism;  but  they  were  undertaken  without 
a  dream  of  these  remote  results.  And  in  our  own 
day  the  greatest  of  scientific  triumphs,  which  is 
the  theory  of  evolution,  was  neither  worked  out 
with  any  hope  of  material  benefits  to  mankind 
nor  has  it  offered  any  prospect  of  them  as  yet. 
The  same  may  be  said  of  modern  sidereal  astron- 
omy. From  the  humanist  point  of  view  it  would 
not  be  easy  to  justify  the  enormous  expenditure 
of  energy,  money,  and  time  that  this  science  has 
absorbed.  The  schoolmen  have  been  much  ridi- 
culed for  discussing  the  question  how  many 
angels  could  dance  on  the  point  of  a  needle; 
but  as  a  purely  speculative  problem  it  surety 
merits  as  much  attention  as  the  total  number  of 
the  stars,  the  rates  of  their  velocities,  or  the  law 
of  their  distribution  through  space.  A  school- 
man might  even  have  urged  in  justification  of 
his  curiosity  that  some  of  us  might  feel  a  reason- 
able curiosity  about  the  exact  size — if  size  they 
have — of  beings  with  whom  we  hope  to  asso- 
ciate one  day;  whereas  by  the  confession  of 
the  astronomers  themselves  neither  we  nor  our 
descendants  can  ever  hope  to  verify  by  direct 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         27 

measurement  the  precarious  guesses  of  their 
science  in  this  branch  of  celestial  statics  and 
dynamics. 

Thomas  Hobbes 

It  has  been  shown  that  one  momentous  effect 
of  the  Copernican  astronomy,  as  interpreted  by 
Giordano  Bruno,  was  to  reverse  the  relative 
importance  ascribed  in  Aristotle's  philosophy 
to  the  two  great  categories  of  Power  and  Act, 
giving  to  Power  a  value  and  dignity  of  which  it 
had  been  stripped  by  the  judgment  of  Plato  and 
Aristotle.  Even  Epicurus,  when  he  rehabilitated 
infinite  space,  had  been  careful  as  a  moralist  to 
urge  the  expediency  of  placing  a  close  limita- 
tion on  human  desires,  denouncing  the  excesses 
of  avarice  and  ambition  more  mildly  but  not  less 
decisively  than  the  contemporary  Stoic  school. 
Thus  Lucretius  describes  his  master  as  travel- 
ling beyond  the  flaming  walls  of  the  world  only 
that  he  may  bring  us  back  a  knowledge  of  the 
fixed  barrier  set  by  the  very  laws  of  existence 
to  our  aspirations  and  hopes. 

The  classic  revival  of  the  Renaissance  did  not 
bring  back  the  Greek  spirit  of  moderation. 
On  the  contrary,  the  new  world,  the  new  astron- 
omy, the  new  monarchy,  and  the  new  religion 
combined  to  create  such  a  sense  of  Power,  in 
contradistinction  to  Act,  as  the  world  had  never 


28  Modern  Philosophy 

before  known.  For  us  this  new  feeling  has 
received  its  most  triumphant  artistic  expression 
from  Shakespeare  and  Milton,  for  France  from 
Rabelais,  for  Italy  from  Ariosto  and  Michel- 
angelo. Injghilosophy  Bacon  strikes  the  same 
note  when  he  values  knowledge  as  a  source  of 
power — knowledge  which  for  Greek  philosophy 
meant  rather  a  lesson  in  self-restraint.  And 
this  idea  receives  a  further  development  from 
Bacon's  chief  successor  in  English  philosophy, 
Thomas  Hobbes  (1588-1679),  in  whose  system 
love  of  power  figures  as  the  very  essence  of 
human  nature,  the  self-conscious  manifestation 
of  that  Motion  which  is  the  real  substance  of  the 
physical  world. 

Hobbes  was  a  precocious  child,  and  received  a 
good  school  training ;  but  the  five  years  he  spent 
at  Oxford  added  nothing  to  his  information, 
and  a  continental  tour  with  the  young  heir  of 
the  Cavendishes  had  no  other  effect  than  to  con- 
vince him  of  the  general  contempt  into  which  the 
scholasticism  still  taught  at  Oxford  had  fallen. 
On  returning  to  England,  he  began  his  studies 
over  again  in  the  Cavendish  library,  acquiring 
a  thorough  familiarity  with  the  classic  literature 
of  Greece  and  Rome,  ^jdeep  hatred  (imbibed 
through  Thucydides)  of  democracy,  and  a  genu- 
inely antique  theory  that  the  State  should  be  su- 
preme in  religious  no  less  than  in  civil  matters. 
Amid  these  studies  Hobbes  occasionally  enjoyed 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         29 

the  society  of  Bacon,  then  spending  his  last  years 
in  the  retirement  of  Gorhambury.  As  secretary 
and  Latin  translator  he  proved  serviceable  to 
the  ex-Chancellor,  but  remained  quite  unaffected 
by  his  inductive  and  experimental  philosophy. 
Indeed,  the  determining  impulse  of  his  specula- 
tive activity  came  from  the  opposite  quarter. 
Going  abroad  once  more  as  travelling  tutor,  at 
the  age  of  forty,  he  chanced  on  a  copy  of  Euclid 
in  a  gentleman's  library  lying  open  at  the  famous 
Forty-Seventh  Proposition.  His  first  impulse  was 
to  reject  the  theorem  as  impossible;  but,  on 
going  backwards  from  proposition  to  proposi- 
tion, he  laid  down  the  book  not  only  convinced, 
but  "in  love  with  geometry." 

Beginning  so  late  in  life,  his  ulterior  studies 
led  Hobbes  into  the  belief  that  he  had  squared 
the  circle,  besides  the  far  more  pernicious  error 
of  applying  the  deductive  method  of  geometry  to 
the  solution  of  political  problems.  Could  he 
and  Bacon  have  exchanged  philosophies,  the 
brilliant  faculties  of  each  might  have  been  em- 
ployed to  better  purpose.  The  categories  of 
Form  and  Matter,  combined  with  the  logic  of 
elimination  and  tentative  generalisation,  would 
have  found  a  fitting  field  for  their  application  in 
the  familiar  facts  of  human  nature.  But  those 
facts  refused  to  be  treated  as  so  many  wheels, 
pulleys,  and  cords  in  a  machine  for  crushing  the 
life  out  of  society  and  transmitting  the  will  of  a 


30  Modern  Philosophy 

single  despot  unresisted  through  its  whole  extent ; 
for  such  is  a  faithful  picture  of  what  a  well- 
governed  community,  as  Hobbes  conceived  it, 
ought  to  be.  vDuring  his  second  residence  abroad 
he  had  become  acquainted  with  the  physical 
philosophy  of  Galileo — the  theory  that  regards 
every  change  in  the  external  or  phenomenal 
world  as  a  mere  rearrangement  of  matter  and  mo- 
tion, matter  being  an  aggregate  of  independent 
molecules  held  together  by  mechanical  pressure 
and  impact.  The  component  parts  of  this  aggre- 
gate become  known  to  us  by  the  impressions 
their  movements  produce  on  our  senses,  traces 
of  which  are  preserved  in  memory,  and  sub- 
sequently recalled  by  association.  Language 
consists  of  signs,  conventionally  affixed  to  such 
images;  only  the  signs,  standing  as  they  do 
for  all  objects  of  a  certain  sort,  have  a  universal 
value,  not  possessed  by  the  original  sensations, 
through  which  reasoning  becomes  possible. 
Hobbes  had  evidently  fallen  in  love  with 
algebra  as  well  as  with  geometry ;  and  it  is  on  the 
type  of  algebraic  reasoning — in  other  words,  on 
the  type  of  rigorous  deduction — that  his  logic  is 
constructed.  And  such  a  view  of  the  way  in 
which  knowledge  advances  seemed  amply  justi- 
fied by  the  scientific  triumphs  of  his  age.  But 
his  principle  that  all  motion  originates  in  ante- 
cedent motion,  although  plausible  in  itself  and 
occasionally  revived  by  ingenious  speculators, 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         31 

has  not  been  verified  by  modern  science.  Gravi- 
tation, cohesion,  and  chemical  affinity  have, 
so  far,  to  be  accepted  as  facts  not  resoluble 
into  more  general  facts.  Hobbes  died  before  the 
great  discoveries  of  Newton  which  first  turned 
away  men's  minds  from  the  purely  mechanical 
interpretation  of  energy. 

That  mechanical  interpretation  led  our  philo- 
sopher to  reJecOLrTstbtTe^s  notion  of  sociality  as 
an  essentially  human  characteristic.  To  him  this 
seemed  a  mere  occult  quality,  the  substitution  of 
a  word  for  an  explanation.  The  counter- view 
put  forth  in  his  great  work,  Leviathan,  is  com- 
monly called  atomistic.  But  it  would  be  gross 
flattery  to  compare  the  ultimate  elements  of 
society,  as  Hobbes  conceived  them,  to  the  mole- 
cules of  modern  science,  which  attract  as  well  as 
repel  each  other;  or  even  with  the  Democritean 
atoms,  which  are  at  least  neutral.  According 
to  him,  the  tendency  to  self-preservation,  shared 
by  men  with  all  other  beings,  takes  the  form 
of  an  insatiable  appetite  for  power,  leading 
each  individual  to  pursue  his  own  aggrandise- 
ment at  the  cost  of  any  loss  or  suffering  to 
the  rest.  And  he  tries  to  prove  the  perma- 
nence of  this  impulse  by  referring  to  the 
precautions  against  robbery  taken  by  house- 
holders and  travellers.  Aristotle  had  much 
more  justly  mentioned  the  kindnesses  shown  to 
travellers  as  a  proof  of  how  widely  goodwill  is 


32  Modern  Philosophy 

diffused.  Our  countryman,  with  all  his  acute- 
ness,  strangely  ignores  the  necessity  as  a  matter 
of  prudence  of  going  armed  and  locking  the  door 
at  night,  even  if  the  robbers  amounted  only 
to  one  in  a  thousand  of  the  population.  Mod- 
ern researches  have  shown  that  there  are  very 
primitive  societies  where  the  assumed  war  of 
all  against  each  is  unknown,  predatory  conflicts 
being  a  mark  of  more  advanced  civilisation, 
and  the  cause  rather  than  the  effect  of  anti- 
social impulses. 

Gi^iiting__^^joriginal^state  of  anarchy  and 
internecine  hostility,  there  is,  according  to 
Hobbes,  only  one  way  out  of  it,  which  is  a  joint 
resolution  of  the  whole  community  to  surre_n- 
der  their  rights  of  individual  sovereignty  into 
the  hands  of  one  man,  who  thenceforth  be- 
comes absolute  ruler  of  the  State,  with  au- 
thority to  defend  its  citizens  against  mutual 
aggressions,  and  the  whole  community  against 
attacks  from  a  foreign  Power.  This  agreement 
constitutes  the  famous  Social  Contract,  of  which 
so  much  was  to  be  heard  during  the  next 
century  and  a  half.  It  holds  as  between  the 
citizens  themselves,  but  not  between  the 
subjects  and  their  sovereign,  for  that  would  be 
admitting  a  responsibility  which  there  is  no 
power  to  enforce.  And  anyone  refusing  to  obey 
the  sovereign  justly  forfeits  his  life;  for  he 
thereby  returns  to  the  State  of  Nature,  where 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         33 

any  man  that  likes  may  kill  his  neighbour  if 
he  can. 

All  this  theory  of  an  original  institution  of 
the  State  by  contract  impresses  a  modern  reader 
as  utterly  unhistorical.  But  its  value,  if  any, 
does  not  depend  on  its  historical  truth.  Even  if 
the  remote  ancestors  of  the  seventeenth-century 
Europeans  had  surrendered  all  their  individual 
rights,  with  certain  trifling  exceptions,  into  the 
hands  of  an  autocrat,  no  sophistry  could  show 
that  their  mutual  engagements  were  binding  on 
the  subjects  of  Charles  I.  and  Louis  XIV.  And 
it  is  really  on  expediency,  understood  in  the  larg- 
est sense,  that  the  claims  of  the  New  Monarchy 
are  based  by  Hobbes.  What  he  maintains 
is  that  nothing  short  of  a  despotic  govern- 
ment exercised  by  one  man  can  save  society  from 
relapsing  into  chaos.  But  even  under  this 
amended  form  the  theory  remains  amenable  to 
historical  criticism.  Had  Hobbes  pursued  his 
studies  beyond  Thucydides,  he  would  have  found 
that  other  polities  besides  the  Athenian  demo- 
cracy broke  down  at  the  hour  of  trial.  Above 
all,  Roman  Imperialism,  which  seems  to  have 
been  his  ideal,  failed  to  secure  its  subjects  either 
against  internal  disorder  or  against  foreign 
invasion. 

Democracy,  however,  was  not  the  sole  or  the 
worst  enemy  dreaded  by  the  author  of  Leviathan 
as  a  competitor  with  his  " mortal  god/7  In  the 


34  Modern  Philosophy 

frontispiece  of  that  work  the  deified  monarch 
who  holds  the  sword  erect  with  his  right  hand 
grasps  the  crosier  with  his  left,  thus  typifying 
the  union  of  the  spiritual  and  temporal  powers 
in  the  same  person.  The  publicists  of  the  Italian 
Renaissance,  with  their  classical  ideals,  had, 
indeed,  been  as  anti-papal  as  the  Protestants ;  and 
the  political  disorders  fomented  by  the  agents 
of  the  Catholic  reaction  during  the  last  hundred 
years  had  given  Hobbes  an  additional  reason  for 
perpetuating  their  point  of  view.  Meanwhile 
another  menace  to  public  order  had  presented 
itself  from  an  opposite  quarter.  Calvinism  had 
created  a  new  spiritual  power  based  on  the  free 
individual  interpretation  of  Scripture,  in  close 
alliance  with  the  alleged  rights  of  conscience 
and  with  the  spirit  of  republican  liberty.  Each 
creed  in  turn  had  attacked  the  Stuart  monarchy, 
and  the  second  had  just  effected  its  overthrow. 
Therefore,  to  save  the  State  it  was  necessary  that 
religious  creeds,  no  less  than  codes  of  conduct, 
should  be  dictated  by  the  secular  authority, 
enslaving  men's  minds  as  well  as  their  bodies. 

By  the  dialectic  irony  of  the  speculative  move- 
ment, this  attempt  to  fetter  opinion  was  turned 
into  an  instrument  for  its  more  complete  eman- 
cipation. In  order  to  discredit  the  pretensions 
of  the  religious  zealots,  Hobbes  made  a  series  of 
attacks  on  the  foundations  of  their  faith,  mostly 
by  way  of  suggestion  and  innuendo — no  more 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         35 

being  possible  under  the  conditions  then  obtain- 
ing— but  with  such  effect  that,  according  to 
Macaulay,  "for  many  years  the  Leviathan  was 
the  gospel  of  cold-blooded  and  hard-headed  un- 
believers/* That  one  who  made  religious  belief  a 
matter  to  be  fixed  by  legislation  could  be  in  any 
sense  a  Christian  seems  most  unlikely.  He 
professed,  with  what  sincerity  we  know  not,  to 
regard  the  existence  of  God  as  something  only 
a  fool  could  deny.  But  his  philosophy  from 
beginning  to  end  forms  a  rigorously-thought- 
out  system  of  materialism  which  any  atheist, 
if  otherwise  it  satisfied  him,  might  without 
inconsistency  accept. 

On  the  meeting  of  the  Long  Parliament, 
Hobbes  again  left  England  for  the  Continent, 
where  he  remained  for  eleven  years.  But  his 
principles  were  no  more  to  the  taste  of  the  exiled 
royalists  than  of  their  opponents.  He  therefore 
returned  once  more  to  England,  made  his  sub- 
mission to  the  Parliament,  and  spent  the  rest  of 
his  days,  practically  unmolested  by  either  party, 
under  the  Commonwealth  and  the  Restoration 
until  his  death  in  1679  at  the  age  of  ninety-one. 

It  may  be  said  of  Hobbes,  as  of  Bacon,  that  the 
intellect  at  work  is  so  amazing  and  the  mass  of 
literary  performance  so  imposing  that  the  illu- 
sions of  historians  about  the  value  of  their 
contributions  to  the  progress  of  thought  are 
excusable.  Nevertheless,  it  cannot  be  too 


36  Modern  Philosophy 

distinctly  stated  that  the  current  or  academic 
estimate  of  these  great  men  as  having  ef- 
fected a  revolution  in  physical  and  moral 
science  is  wrong.  They  stand  as  much  apart 
from  the  true  line  of  evolution  as  do  the  gigan- 
tic saurians  of  a  remote  geological  period  whose 
remains  excite  our  wonder  in  museums  of  natural 
history.  Their  systems  proved  as  futile  as  the 
monarchies  of  Philip  II.  and  of  Louis  XIV. 
Bacon's  dreams  are  no  more  related  to  the  coming 
victories  of  science  than  Raleigh's  El  Dorado 
was  to  the  future  colonial  empire  of  Britain. 
Hobbes  had  better  fortune  than  Straff ord,  in  so 
far  as  he  kept  his  head  on  his  shoulders ;  but  the 
logic  of  his  absolutism  shrivelled  up  under  the 
sun  of  English  liberty  like  the  great  Minister's 
policy  of  Thorough. 

The  theory  of  a  Social  Contract  is  a  specu- 
lative idea  of  the  highest  practical  importance. 
But  the  idea  of  contract  as  the  foundation  of 
morals  goes  back  to  Epicurus,  and  it  is  assumed 
in  a  more  developed  form  by  Hooker's  Eccle- 
siastical Polity.  Its  potency  as  a  revolutionary 
instrument  comes  from  the  reinterpretations 
of  Locke  and  Rousseau,  which  run  directly 
counter  to  the  assumptions  of  the  Leviathan. 

Hobbes  shares  with  Bacon  the  belief  that  jail 
knowledge  comes  from  experience,  besides  mak- 
ing it  clearer  than  his  predecessor  that  experience 
of  the  world  comes  through  external  sense  alone. 


The  Philosophical  Renaissance         37 

Here  also  there  can  be  no  claim  to  originality,  for 
more  than  one  school  of  Greek  philosophy  had 
said  the  same.  As  an  element  of  subsequent 
thought,  more  importance  belongs  to  the  idea 
of  Power,  which  was  to  receive  its  full  devel- 
opment from  Spinoza;  but  only  in  association 
with  other  ideas  derived  from  the  philosopher 
whom  we  have  next  to  examine,  the  founder 
of  modern  metaphysics,  Descartes. 


CHAPTER   II 

THE   METAPHYSICIANS 

Descartes,  Malebranche,  Spinoza,  Leibniz 


RENE_JD>ES^^  was    a 

Frenchman,  born  in  Touraine,  and  belong- 
ing by  family  to  the  inferior  nobility.  Educated 
at  the  Jesuit  college  of  La  Fl£che,  he  early  ac- 
quired a  distaste  for  the  scholastic  philosophy,  or 
at  least  for  its  details;  the  theology  of  scholastic- 
ism, as  we  shall  see,  left  a  deep  impression  on 
him  through  life.  On  leaving  college  he  took  up 
mathematics,  varied  by  a  short  plunge  into  the 
dissipations  of  Paris.  Some  years  of  military 
service  as  a  volunteer  with  the  Catholic  armies 
at  the  beginning  of  the  Thirty  Years'  War 
enabled  him  to  travel  and  see  the  world.  Return- 
ing to  Paris,  he  resumed  his  studies,  but  found 
them  seriously  interrupted  by  the  tactless  bores 
who,  as  we  know  from  Moliere's  amusing  comedy 
Les  Fdcheux,  long  continued  to  infest  French 
society.  To  escape  their  assiduities  Descartes, 
who  prized  solitude  before  all  things,  fled  the 
38 


RENE  DESCARTES 


The  Metaphysicians  39 

country.  The  inheritance  of  an  independent  in- 
come enabled  the  philosopher  to  live  where  he 
liked;  and  Holland  became,  with  a  few  inter- 
ruptions, his  chosen  residence  for  the  next 
twenty  years  (1629-49).  Even  here  frequent 
changes  of  residence  and  occasional  conceal- 
ment of  his  address  were  necessary  in  order  to 
elude  the  visits  of  importunate  admirers.  With 
all  his  unsociability  there  seems  to  have  been 
something  singularly  magnetic  about  the  person-  I 
ality  of  Descartes;  yet  he  fell  in  with  only  one 
congenial  spirit,  the  Princess  Elizabeth,  daughter 
of  the  unfortunate  Winter  King  and  grand- 
daughter of  our  James  I.  Possessing  to  the 
fullest  extent  the  intellectual  brilliancy  and 
the  incomparable  charm  of  the  Stuart  family, 
this  great  lady  impressed  the  lonely  thinker 
as  the  only  person  who  ever  understood  his 
philosophy. 

Another  royal  friendship  brought  his  career  to 
an  untimely  end.  Queen  Christina  of  Sweden, 
the  gifted  and  restless  daughter  of  Gustavus  * 
Adolphus,  heard  of  Descartes,  and  invited  him 
to  her  Court.  On  his  arrival  she  sent  for  the 
pilot  who  had  brought  the  illustrious  stranger 
to  Stockholm  and  questioned  him  about  his 
passenger.  " Madame, "  he  replied,  "it  is  not  a 
man  whom  I  conducted  to  your  Majesty,  but  a 
demi-god.  He  taught  me  more  in  three  weeks 
of  the  science  of  seamanship  and  of  winds  and 


40  Modern  Philosophy 

navigation  than  I  had  learned  in  the  sixty  years 
I  had  been  at  sea"  (Miss  E.  S.  Haldane's  Life  of 
Rene  Descartes).  The  Queen  fully  came  up  to 
the  expectations  of  her  visitor,  in  whose  eyes  she 
had  no  fault  but  an  unfortunate  tendency  to 
waste  her  time  on  learning  Greek.  Besides  her 
other  merits,  she  possessed  ' '  a  sweetness  and 
goodness  which  made  men  devoted  to  her  ser- 
vice." It  -soon  appeared  that,  as  with  others 
of  the  same  rank,  this  was  only  the  veneer 
of  a  heartless  selfishness.  Christina,  who  was 
an  early  riser,  required  his  attendance  in  her 
library  to  give  her  lessons  in  philosophy  at  five 
o'clock  in  the  morning.  Descartes  was  by  habit 
a  very  late  riser.  Besides,  he  had  not  even  a 
lodging  in  the  royal  palace,  but  was  staying  at 
the  French  Embassy,  and  in  going  there  "had  to 
pass  over  a  long  bridge  which  was  always  bitterly 
cold."  The  cold  killed  him.  He  had  arrived 
at  Stockholm  in  October,  and  meant  to  leave  in 
January;  but  remained  at  the  urgent  request  of 
the  Queen,  who,  however,  made  no  change  in 
the  hour  of  their  interviews,  although  that 
winter  was  one  of  the  severest  on  record.  At 
the  beginning  of  February,  1650,  he  fell  ill  and 
died  of  inflammation  of  the  lungs  on  the  nth, 
in  the  fifty-fourth  year  of  his  age. 

Descartes  had  the  physical  courage  which 
Hobbes  lacked;  but  he  seems,  like  Bacon,  to 
have  been_a  moral  coward.  The  most  striking 


The  Metaphysicians  41 

instance  of  this  is  that,  on  hearing  of  Galileo's 
condemnation  for  teaching  the  heliocentric 
astronomy,  he  withheld  from  publication  and 
even  had  thoughts  of  destroying  a  work  of  his 
own  in  which  the  same  doctrine  was  maintained. 
This  was  at  a  time  when  he  was  living  in  a 
country  where  there  could  be  no  question  of  per- 
sonal danger  from  the  Inquisition.  But  some- 
thing of  the  same  weakness  shows  itself  in  his 
running  away  from  France  to  escape  those  in- 
trusions on  his  studious  retirement  which  one 
would  think  might  have  been  checked  by  letting 
it  be  known  with  sufficient  firmness  that  his 
hours  could  not  be  wasted  on  idle  conversation. 
And  we  have  seen  how  at  last  his  life  was  lost 
for  no  better  reason  than  the  dread  of  giving 
offence  to  Queen  Christina. 

It  seems  strange  that  a  character  so  unheroic 
should  figure  among  the  great  emancipators  of 
human  thought.  In  fact,  Descartes's  services 
to  liberty  have  been  much  exaggerated.  His 
intellectual  fame  rests  on  three  foundations. 
Of  these  the  most  indubitable  is  the  creation  of 
analytical  ffeometry^  the  starting-point  of  modern 
mathematics.  The  value  of  his  contributions  to 
physics  has  been  much  disputed;  but,  on  the 
whole,  expert  opinion  seems  to  have  decided  that 
what  was  new  in  them  was  not  true,  and  what 
was  true  was  not  new.  However,  the  place 
we  must  assign  Descartes  in  the  history  of  philo- 


42  Modern  Philosophy 

sophy  can  only  be  determined  by  our  opinion 
of  his  metaphysics. 

,   As  a  philosopher  Descartes  has,  to  begin  with, 

M,he  merit  of   exemplary  clearness^     The  fault 

is  not    with    him    if  we  cannot   tell   what   he 

thought   and  how  he  came  to  think  it.      The 

classic  Discourse  on  Method  (1637)  relates  his 

mental  history  in  a  style  of  almost  touching 

v/simplicity.     Tt-£rPparft  t.ha*  frr>TT1  art  ^dy.Jig^ 

truth    Vmrl   frfp.r>    his   param^m!  obiect.    not   as 

with  Bacon  and  Hobbes  for  its  utility,  but  for 

its  own  sake.     In  search  of  this  ideal  he  read 

...  • 

widely,  but  without  finding  what  he  wanted. 
The  great  and  famous  works  of  literature  might 
entertain  or  dazzle;  they  could  not  convince. 
The  philosophers  professed  to  teach  truth ;  their 
endless  disputes  showed  that  they  had  not 
found  it.  Mathematics,  on  the  other  hand, 
presented  a  pleasing  picture  of  demonstrated 
certainty,  but  a  certainty  that  seemed  to  be 
prized  only  as  a  sure  foundation  for  the  me- 
chanical arts.  Wearily  throwing  his  books 
aside,  the  young  man  then  applied  himself  to  the 
great  book  of  life,  mingling  with  all  sorts  and 
conditions  of  men  to  hear  what  they  had  to  say 
about  the  prime  interests  of  existence.  But 
the  same  vanity  and  vexation  of  spirit  followed 
him  here.  Men  were  no  more  agreed  among 
themselves  than  were  the  authorities  of  his 
college  days.  The  truths  of  religion  seemed, 


The  Metaphysicians  43 

indeed,  to  offer  a  safe  refuge;  but  they  were 
an.  exception  that  proved  the  rule;  being,  as 
Descartes  observes,  a  supernatural  revelation, 
not  the  natural  knowledge  that  he  wanted. 

The  conflict  of  authorities  had  at  least  one 
good  result,  which  was  to  discredit  the  very 
notion  of  authority,  thus  throwing  the  inquirer 
back  on  his  own  reason  as  the  sole  remaining 
resource.  And_as  ma^Jiematics  seemed,  so  far, 
to  be  the  onl^c— satisfactory  science,  the  most 
reasonable  course  was  to  give  a  wider  extension 
and  application  to  the  methods  of  algebra  and 
geometry.  Four  fundamental  rules  were  thus 
obtained:  (i)  To  admit  nothing  as  true  that  was 
not  evidently  so;  (2)  to  analyse  every  problem 
into  as  many  distinct  questions  as  the  nature  of 
the  subject  required;  (3)  to  ascend  gradually 
from  the  simplest  to  the  most  complex  subjects ; 
and  (4)  to  be  sure  that  his  enumerations  and 
surveys  were  so  exhaustive  and  complete  as  to 
let  no  essential  element  of  the  question  escape. 

The  rules  as  they  stand  are  ill-arranged,  vague, 
and  imperfect.  The  last  should  come  first 
and  the  first  last.  The  notions  of  simplicity, 
complexity,  and  truth  are  neither  illustrated 
nor  defined.  And  no  pains  are  taken  to  dis- 
criminate judgments  from  concepts.  It  may  be 
said  that  the  method  worked  well;  at  least 
Descartes  tells  us  that  with  the  help  of  his  rules 
he  made  rapid  progress  in  the  solution  of 


44  Modern  Philosophy 

mathematical  problems.  We  may  believe  in 
his  success  without  admitting  that  an  inferior 
genius  could  have  achieved  the  same  results  by 
the  same  means.  The  real  point  is  to  ascertain 
whether  the  method,  whatever  its  utility  in 
mathematics,  could  be  advantageously  applied 
to  metaphysics.  And  the  answer  seems  to  be 
that  as  manipulated  by  its  author  the  new 
system  led  to  nothing  but  hopeless  fallacies. 

After  reserving  a  provisional  assent  to  the 
customs  of  the  country  where  he  happens  to  be 
residing  and  to  the  creed  of  the  Roman  Church, 
Descartes  begins  by  calling  in  question  the 
whole  mass  of  beliefs  he  has  hitherto  ac- 
cepted, including  the  reality  of  the  external 
world.  But  the  ygrjL  QH~  nf  AWht  implies  t.V>g 
existence  of  tfre  doubter  himself,  I  think, 
therefore  I  am.  It  has  been  supposed  that  the 
initial  affirmation  of  this  self-evident  principle 
implies  that  Descartes  identified  B^nff .  with 
Thought.  He  did  n£  such  thing.  No  more  is 
meant,  to  begin  withTthan  that,  whatever  else  is 
or  is  not,  I  the  thinker  certainly  am.  This 
is  no  great  discovery;  the  interesting  thing  is 
to  find  out  what  it  implies.  A  good  deal 
according  to  Descartes.  First  he  infers  that, 
since  the  act  of  thinking  assures  him  of  his 
existence,  therefore  he  is  a  substance  the  whole 
essence  of  which  consists  in  thought,  which  is 
independent  of  place  and  of  any  material  object 


The  Metaphysicians  45 

—in  short,  an  immaterial  soul,  entirely  distinct 
from  the  body,  easier  to  know,  and  capable  of 
existing  without  it.  Here  the  confusion  of  con- 
ception with  judgment  is  apparent,  and  it  leads 
to  a  confusion  of  our  thoughts  about  reality  with 
the  realities  themselves.  And  Descartes  carries 
this  loose  reasoning  a  step  further  by  going  on 
to  argue  that,  as  the  certainty  of  his  own  exist- 
ence has  no  other  guarantee  than  the  clearness 
with  which  it  is  inferred  from  the  fact  of  his 
thinking,  it  must  therefore  be  a  safe  rule  to  con- 
clude that  whatever  things  we  conceive  very 
clearly  and  distinctly  are  all  true. 

In  his  other  great  philosophical  work,  the 
Meditations,  Descartes  sets  out  at  greater  length, 
but  with  less  clearness ,  his  arguments  for  the 
dniniateriality  _of  t.Kg.  sn^l,  Here  it  is  fully 
admitted  that,  besides  thinking,  self-conscious- 
ness covers  the  functions  of  perceiving,  feeling, 
desiring,  and  willing;  nor  does  it  seem  to  be 
pretended  that  these  experiences  are  reducible 
to  forms  of  thought.  But  it  is  claimed  that 
they  depend  on  thought  in  the  sense  that  with- 
out thought  one  would  not  be  aware  of  their 
existence;  whereas  it  can  easily  be  conceived 
without  them.  A  little  more  introspection 
would  show  that  the  second  part  of  the  assertion 
is  not  true;  for  there  is  no  thought  without 
words,  and  no  words,  however  inaudibly  articu- 
lated, without,  a  number  of  tactual  and  muscu- 


46  Modern  Philosophy 

lar  sensations,  nor  even  without  a  series  rf 
distinct  volitions. 

Another  noticeable  point  is  that,  so  far  from 
obeying  the  methodical  rule  to  proceed  from  the 
simple  to  the  complex,  Descartes  does  just  the 
contrary.  Starting  with  the  whole  complex 
content  of  consciousness,  he  works  down  by 
a  series  of  arbitrary  rejections  to  what,  ac- 
cording to  him,  is  the  simple  fact  of  ijnmaj 
terial  thought.  Let  us  see  how  it  fares  with  his 
attempt  to  reconstruct  knowledge  on  that 
elementary  basis. 

Returning  to  his  postulate  of  universal  doubt, 
our  philosopher  argues  from  this  to  an  imper- 
fection in  his  nature,  and  thence  to  the  idea 
of  a  perfect  being.  The  reasoning  is  most  slip- 
shod; for,  even  admitting  that  knowledge  is 
preferable  to  ignorance — which  has  not  been 
proved — it  does  not  follow  that  the  dogmatist  is 
more  perfect  than  the  doubter.  Indeed,  one 
might  infer  the  contrary  from  Descartes's  having 
passed  with  progressive  reflection  from  the  one 
stage  to  the  other.  Overlooking  the  paralogism, 
let  us  grant  that  he  has  the  idea  of  a  perfect 
being,  and  go  on  to  the  question  of  how  he 
came  to  possess  it.  One  might  suggest  that 
the  consciousness  of  perfect  self-knowledge, 
combined  with  the  wish  to  know  more  of 
other  subjects,  would  be  sufficient  to  create  an 
ideal  of  ominiscience,  and,  proceeding  in  like 


The  Metaphysicians  47 

manner  from  a  comparison  of  wants  with  their 
satisfactions,  to  enlarge  this  ideal  into  the  notion 
of  infinite  perfection  all  round.  Descartes,  how- 
ever, is  not  really  out  for  truth — at  least,  not 
in  metaphysics;  he  is  out  for  a  justification  of 
what  the  Jesuits  had  taught  him  at  La  Fleche, 
and  no  Jesuit  casuistry  could  be  more  sophisti- 
cal than  the  logic  he  finds  good  enough  for 
the  purpose. v  To  argue,  as  he  does,  that  the 
idea  of  a  perfect  being,  in  his  mind,  can  be 
explained  only  by  its  proceeding  from  such  a 
being  as  its  creator  is  already  sufficiently  au- 
dacious. But  this  feat  is  far  surpassed  by  his 
famous  o^t.nlng-ipfl.1  proof  of  -Theism.  A  trian- 
gle, he  tells  us,  need  not  necessarily  exist;  but, 
assuming  there  to  be  one,  its  three  angles  must 
be  equal  to  two  right  angles.  With  God,  on  the 
other  hand,  to  be  conceived  is  to  be ;  for,  existence 
hgfqft  a.  pp.rfcpt.jnr>,  it  follows,  from  the  idea  of  a 
perfect  Being,  that  he  must  exist.  The  answer  is 
more  clear  and  distinct  than  any  of  Descartes 's 
demonstrations.  Perfection  is  affirmed  of  ex- 
isting or  of  imaginary  subjects,  but  existence  is 
not  a  perfection  in  itself. 

A  third  argument  for  Theism  remains  to  be 
considered.  Descartes  asks  how  he  came  to 
exist.  Not  by  his  own  act;  for  on  that  hy- 
pothesis he  would  have  given  himself  all  the 
perfections  that  now  he  lacks;  nor  from  any 
other  imperfect  cause,  for  that  would  be  to 


48  Modern  Philosophy 

repeat  the  difficulty,  not  to  solve  it.  Besides, 
the  simple  continuance  of  his  existence  from 
moment  to  moment  needs  an  explanation.  For 
time  consists  of  an  infinity  of  parts,  none  de- 
pending in  any  way  on  the  others  ;  so  that  my 
having  been  a  little  while  ago  is  no  reason  why  I 
should  be  now,  unless  there  is  some  power  by/ 
which  I  am  created  anew.  Here  we  must  ob- 
serve that  Descartes  is  playing  fast  and  loose 
with  the  law  of  causation.  By  what  he  calls 
the  light  of  nature  —  in  other  words,  the  light 
of  Greek  philosophy  —  things  can  no  more  pass 
into  nothing  than  they  can  come  out  of  it. 
Moreover,  the  difficulty  is  the  same  for  my 
supposed  Creator  as  for  myself.  We  are  told 
that  thought  js  a. 


^ 
nature      But    thinking    implies    time; 


therefore  God  also  exists  from  moment  to 
moment.  How,  then,  can  he  recover  his  being 
any  more  than  we  can?  The  answer,  of  course, 
would  be:  because  he  is  perfect,  and  perfection 
involves  existence.  Thus  the  argument  from 
causation  throws  us  back  on  the  so-called 
ontological  argument,  whose  futility  has  already 
been  shown. 

This  very  idea  of  perfection  involves  us  in 
fresh  difficulties  with  the  law  of  causation.  A 
perfect  Being  might  be  expected  to  make  perfect 
creatures  —  which  by  hypothesis  we  are  not. 
Descartes  quite  sees  this,  and  only  escapes  by 


The  Metaphysicians  49 

a  verbal  quibble.  Our  imperfections,  he  says, 
come  from  the  share  that  Nothingness  has  in 
our  nature.  Once  allow  so  much  to  the  creative 
power  of  zero,  and  God  seems  to  be  a  rather 
gratuitous  postulate. 

After  proving  to  his  own  satisfaction  the 
existence  of  the  soul  and  of  God,  Descartes 
returns  to  the  starting-point  of  his  whole  inquiry 
— that  is,  the  reality  of  the  material  world 
and  of  its  laws.  And  now  his  theology  sup- 
plies him  with  a  short  and  easy  method  for 
getting  rid  of  the  sceptical  doubts  that  had 
troubled  him  at  first.  He  has  a  clear_  and,  dis- 
tinct idea  of  his  own  body  and  of  other  bodies 
surrounding  it  on  all  sides  as  extended  sub- 
stances communicating  movements  to  one  an- 
other. And  he  has  a  tendency  to  accept  whatever 
is  clearly  and  distinctly  conceived  by  him  as 
true.  But  to  suppose  that  God  created  that 
tendency  with  the  intention  of  deceiving  him 
would  argue  a  want  of  veracity  in  the  divine 
nature  incompatible  with  its  perfection.  Such 
reasoning  obviously  ignores  the  alternative  that 
God  might  be  deceiving  us  for  our  good.  Or 
rather  what  we  call  truth  might  not  be  an  insight 
into  the  nature  of  things  in  themselves,  but  a 
correct  judgment  of  antecedents  and  conse- 
quents. Our  consciousness  would  then  be  a 
vast  sensori-motor  machinery  adjusted  to  secure 
the  maintenance  and  perfection  of  life. 

4 


SO  Modern  Philosophy 

Descartes,  as  a  mathematician,  places  the 
essence  of  -^attgr_or  .Bo^y  ™  exforisinTi.  Here 
he  agrees  with  another  mathematical  philoso- 
pher, Plato,  who  says  the  same  in  his  Timceus. 
So  far  the  coincidence  might  be  accidental ;  but 
when  we  find  that  the  Frenchman,  like  the 
Greek,  conceives  his  materialised  space  as  beim* 
originally  divided  into  triangular  bodies,  the 
evidence  of  unacknowledged  borrowing  seems 
irresistible — the  more  so  that  Huyghens  men- 
tions this  as  customary  with  Descartes. 

The  great  author  of  the  Method  and  the 
Meditations — for,  after  every  critical  deduction, 
his  greatness  as  a  thinker  remains  undoubted — 
contributed  nothing  to  ethics.  Here  he  is 
content  to  reaffirm  the  general  conclusions  of 
Greek  philosophy,  the  necessary  superiority  of 
mind  to  matter,  of  the  soul  to  the  body,  of 
spirit  to  sense.  He  accepts  free-will  from 
Aristotle  without  any  attempt  to  reconcile  it 
with  the  rigid  determinism  of  his  own  me- 
chanical naturalism.  At  the  same  time  there  is 
a  remarkable  anticipation  of  modern  psychology 
in  his  doctrine  of  intellectual  assent  as  an 
act  of  the  will.  When  our  judgments  go  be- 
yond what  is  guaranteed  by  a  clear  and  distinct 
perception  of  their  truth  there  is  a  possibility 
of  error,  and  then  the  error  is  our  own  fault,  the 
precipitate  conclusion  having  been  a  voluntary 
act.  Thus  human  free-will  intervenes  to  clear 


The  Metaphysicians  51 

God  of  all  responsibility  for  our    delusions  as 
well  as  for  our  crimes. 

Malebranche 

Pascal,  we  are  told,  could  not  forgive  Descartes 
for  limiting  God's  action  on  the  world  to  the 
"initial  fillip"  by  which  the  process  of  evolu- 
tion was  started.  Nevertheless,  Pascal's  friends, 
the  Jansenists,  were  content  to  adopt  Cartesian- 
ism  as  their  religious  philosophy,  and  his  epigram 
certainly  does  not  apply  to  the  next  distinguished 
Cartesian,  Arnold  Geulincx  (1625-1669),  a 
Fleming  of  Antwerp.  Unfortunate  in  his  life, 
this  eminent  teacher  has  of  all  original  think- 
ers received  the  least  credit  for  his  services 
to  metaphysics  from  posterity,  being,  outside  a 
small  circle  of  students,  still  utterly  unknown  to 
fame.  Geulincx  is  the  author  of  a  theory  called 
Occasionalism .  Descartes  had  represented  mind , 
which  he  identified  with  Thought,  and  matter, 
which  he  identified  with  Extension,  as  two 
antithetical  substances  with  not  a  note  in  com- 
mon. Nevertheless,  he  supposed  that  communi- 
cations between  them  took  place  through  a  part 
of  the  brain  called  the  pineal  body.  Geulincx 
cut  through  even  this  narrow  isthmus,  denying 
the  possibility  of  any  machinery  for  transmitting 
sensible  images  from  the  material  world  to  our 
consciousness,  or  volitions  from  the  mind  to  the 
limbs.  How,  then,  were  the  facts  to  be  explained  ? 


52  Modern  Philosophy 

According  to  him,  by  the  intervention  of  God. 
When  the  so-called  organs  of  sense  are  acted  on 
by  vibrations  from  the  external  world,  or  when  a 
particular  movement  is  willed  by  the  mind,  the 
corresponding  mental  and  material  modifications 
are  miraculously  produced  by  the  exercise  of  his 
omnipotence;  and  it  is  because  these  events 
occur  on  occasion  of  signals  of  which  they  are 
not  the  effects  but  the  consequents  that  the 
theory  has  received  the  name  of  Occasionalism. 

The  theory,  as  Geulincx  formulated  it,  seems 
at  first  sight  simply  grotesque;  and  from  a 
religious  point  of  view  it  has  the  additional 
drawback  of  making  God  the  immediate  ex- 
ecutor of  every  crime  committed  by  man. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  merely  the  logical  appli- 
cation of  a  principle  subsequently  admitted  by 
profound  thinkers  of  the  most  opposing  schools — 
namely,  that  consciousness  cannot  produce  or 
transmit  energy,  combined  with  the  belief  in  a 
God  who  does  not  exist  for  nothing.  Even  past 
the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century  many 
English  and  French  naturalists  were  persuaded 
that  animal  species  to  the  number  of  300,000 
represented  as  many  distinct  creative  acts; 
and  at  least  one  astronomer,  who  was  also  a 
philosopher,  declared  that  the  ultimate  atoms 
of  matter,  running  up  to  an  immeasurably 
higher  figure,  "bore  the  stamp  of  the  manu- 
factured article." 


The  Metaphysicians  53 

The  capture  of  Cartesianism  by  theology  was 
completed  by  Nicolas  Malebranche  (1638-1715). 
This  accomplished  writer  and  thinker,  dedi- 
cated by  physical  infirmity  to  a  contemplative 
life,  entered  the  Oratory  at  an  early  age,  and 
remained  in  it  until  his  death.  Coming  across 
a  copy  of  Descartes's  Treatise  on  Man  at  twenty- 
six,  he  at  once  became  a  convert  to  the  new 
philosophy,  and  devoted  the  next  ten  years  to 
its  exclusive  study.  At  the  end  of  that  period 
he  published  his  masterpiece,  On  the  Investi- 
gation of  Truth  (De  la  Recherche  de  la  Verite, 
1674),  which  at  once  won  him  an  enormous 
reputation.  It  was  followed  by  other  works 
of  less  importance.  The  legend  that  Male- 
branche's  end  was  hastened  by  an  argument 
with  Berkeley  has  been  disproved. 

Without  acknowledging  the  obligation, 
Malebranche  accepts  the  conclusions  of  Geulincx 
to  the  extent  of  denying  the  possibility  of 
any  communication  between  mind  and  matter. 
Indeed,  he  goes  further,  and  denies  that  one  por- 
tion of  matter  can  act  on  another.  But  his  real 
advance  on  Occasionalism  lies  in  the  question: 
How,  then,  can  we  know  the  laws  of  the  material 
universe,  or  even  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as 
matter  at  all?  Once  more  God  intervenes  to 
solve  the  difficulty,  but  after  a  fashion  much  less 
crude  than  the  miraculous  apparatus  of  Geulincx. 
Introspection  assures  us  that  we  are  thinking 


54  Modern  Philosophy 

things,  and  that  our  minds  are  stored  with  ideas, 
including  the  idea  of  God  the  all-perfect  Being, 
and  the  idea  of  Extension  with  all  the  mathe- 
matical and  physical  truths  logically  deducible 
therefrom.  We  did  not  make  this  idea,  there- 
fore it  comes  from  God,  was  in  God's  mind 
before  it  was  in  ours.  Following  Plotinus,  Male- 
branche  calls  this  idea  intelligible  Extension. 
It  is  the  archetype  of  our  material  world.  The 
same  is  true  of  all  other  clear  and  distinct  ideas ; 
they  are,  as  Platonism  teaches,  of  divine  origin. 
But  is  it  necessary  to  suppose  that  the  ideal 
contents  of  each  separate  soul  were  placed  in  it 
at  birth  by  the  Creator?  Surely  the  law  of 
parsimony  forbids.  It  is  a  simpler  and  easier 
explanation  to  suppose  that  the  divine  arche- 
typal ideas  alone  exist,  and  that  we  apprehend 
them  by  a  mystical  communion  with  the  divine 
consciousness;  that,  in  short,  we  see  all  things  in 
God.  And  in  order  to  make  this  vision  possible 
we  must,  as  the  Apostle  says,  live,  move,  and 
have  our  being  in  God.  As  a  mathematician 
would  say,  God  must  be  the  locus,  the  place  of 
souls. 

There  is  unquestionably  something  grandiose 
about  this  theory,  which,  however,  has  the  defect 
in  orthodox  opinion  of  logically  leading  to  the 
Pantheism,  held  in  abhorrence  by  Malebranche, 
of  his  greater  contemporary  Spinoza.  And  it  is 
a  suggestive  circumstance  that  the  very  similar 


The  Metaphysicians  55 

philosophy  of  the  Eternal  Consciousness,  held  by 
our  countryman  T.  H.  Green,  has  been  shown 
by  the  criticism  of  Henry  Sidgwick  to  exclude 
the  personality  of  God. 

Spinoza 

With  the  philosopher  whom  I  have  just 
named  we  come  for  the  first  time  in  modern 
history  to  a  figure  recalling  in  its  sustained 
equality  of  intellectual  and  moral  excellence 
the  most  heroic  figures  of  Hellenic  thought. 
Giordano  Bruno  we  may,  indeed,  pronounce, 
like  Lucan  or  Cranmer,  "by  his  death  ap- 
proved," but  his  submission  at  Venice  has  to 
be  set  against  his  martyrdom  at  Rome;  and 
if  there  is  nothing  very  censurable  in  his 
career  as  a  wandering  teacher,  there  is  also 
nothing  worthy  of  any  particular  respect.  Dif- 
ferences of  environment  and  heredity  may  no 
doubt  be  invoked  to  account  for  the  difference  of 
character;  and  in  the  philosophy  about  to  be 
considered  the  determining  influence  of  such 
causes  for  the  first  time  finds  due  recognition; 
but  on  the  same  principle  our  ethical  judgments 
also  are  determined  by  the  very  constitution  of 
things. 

Baruch  de  Spinoza  (1632-1677),  born  at 
Amsterdam,  belonged  to  a  family  of  Portuguese 
Jews,  exiled  on  account  of  their  Hebrew  faith,  in 
which  also  he  was  brought  up.  Soon  after  reach- 


56  Modern  Philosophy 

ing  manhood  he  fell  away  from  the  synagogue, 
preferring  to  share  in  the  religious  exercises  of 
certain  latitudinarian  Christian  sects.  Spies 
were  set  to  report  his  conversation,  which  soon 
supplied  evidence  of  sufficiently  heterodox 
opinions.  A  sentence  of  formal  excommuni- 
cation followed;  but  modern  research  has  dis- 
credited the  story  of  an  attempt  to  assassinate 
him  made  by  an  emissary  of  the  synagogue.  After 
successfully  resisting  the  claim  of  his  sister  and 
his  brother-in-law  to  shut  out  the  apostate  from 
his  share  of  the  paternal  inheritance,  Spinoza 
surrendered  the  disputed  property,  but  hence- 
forth broke  off  all  communication  with  his  family. 
Subsequently  he  refused  an  offer  of  2,000  florins, 
made  by  a  wealthy  friend  and  admirer,  Simon 
de  Vries,  as  also  a  proposal  from  the  same  friend 
to  leave  him  his  whole  fortune,  insisting  that  it 
should  go  to  the  legal  heir,  Simon's  brother  Isaac. 
The  latter,  on  succeeding,  wished  to  settle  an 
annual  pension  of  500  florins  on  Spinoza,  but 
the  philosopher  would  accept  no  more  than  300. 
Books  were  his  only  luxury,  material  wants 
being  supplied  by  polishing  glass  lenses,  an  art 
in  which  he  attained  considerable  proficiency. 
But  it  was  an  unhealthy  occupation,  and  pro- 
bably contributed  to  his  death  by  consumption. 

Democracy  was  then  and  long  afterwards1 
associated  with  fanaticism  and  intolerance  rather 
than  with  free-thought  in  religion.  The  liberal 


Cui  natura,Deus,reri4m  ctu  cog-mtus  ordo, 
Hoc  Spinofa  ftalru  conJ[jpicjieii3us    erat. 

Jlxpreflere  viri  £aciem,fed  pingere  jnentem 
Zeiixidis  artifices   non  valwere  mantis, 

Ilia  vig-et     Tcriptis  :  illic  fublumia  tractat: 
Huric  a  mcunc[ue  cupis  nofcere,fcripta  leg-e  . 


BENEDICTUS  SPINOZA 


The  Metaphysicians  57 

party  in  Dutch  politics  was  the  aristocratic 
party.  Spinoza  sympathised  with  its  leader, 
John  de  Witt ;  he  wept  bitter  tears  over  the  great 
statesman's  murder;  and  only  the  urgent  remon- 
strances of  his  friends,  who  knew  what  danger 
would  be  incurred  by  such  a  step,  prevented  him 
from  placarding  the  walls  of  The  Hague,  where 
he  then  resided,  with  an  address  reproaching 
the  infuriated  people  for  their  crime. 

In  1673,  the  enlightened  ruler  of  the  Palatinate, 
a  brother  of  Descartes's  Princess  Elizabeth, 
offered  Spinoza  a  professorship  at  Heidelberg, 
with  full  liberty  to  teach  his  philosophy.  But 
the  pantheistic  recluse  wisely  refused  it.  Even 
at  the  present  day  such  teaching  as  his  would 
meet  with  little  mercy  at  Berlin,  Cambridge,  or 
Edinburgh.  As  it  was,  we  have  reason  to  be- 
lieve that  even  in  free  Holland  only  a  premature 
death  saved  him  from  a  prosecution  for  blas- 
phemy, and  his  great  work,  the  Ethica,  could  not 
with  safety  be  published  during  his  lifetime.  It 
appeared  anonymously  among  his  posthumous 
works  in  November,  1677,  without  the  name  of 
the  true  place  of  publication  on  the  title-page. 

SjDinoza  was  for  his  time  no  less  daring  as  a 
Biblical  critic  than  as  a  metaphysician.  His 
celebrated  Tractatus  Theologico-Politicus  has  for 
its  primary  purpose  to  vindicate  the  freedom  of 
scientific  thought  against  ecclesiastical  inter- 
ference. And  this  he  does  by  drawing  a  trench- 


58  Modern  Philosophy 

ant  line  of  demarcation  between  the  respective 
offices  of  religion  and  of  philosophy.  The  busi- 
ness of  the  one  is  to  form  the  character  and  to 
purify  the  heart,  of  the  other  to  guide  and  inform 
the  intellect.  When  religion  undertakes  to 
teach  scientific  truth  the  very  ends  for  which  it 
exists  are  defeated.  When  theological  dog- 
matism gains  control  of  the  Churches  the  worst 
passions  are  developed  under  its  influence.  In- 
stead of  becoming  lowly  and  charitable,  men 
become  disturbers  of  public  order,  grasping 
intriguers,  bitter  and  censorious  persecutors. 
The  claims  of  theology  to  dictate  our  intellectual 
beliefs  are  not  only  mischievous,  but  totally  in- 
valid. They  rest  on  the  authority  of  the  Bible 
as  a  revelation  of  God's  will.  But  no  such  super- 
natural revelation  ever  was  or  could  be  given. 
Such  violation  of  the  order  of  nature  as  the 
miracles  recorded  in  Scripture  history  would  be 
impossible.  And  the  narratives  recording  them 
are  discredited  by  the  criticism  which  shows  that 
various  books  of  the  Old  Testament  were  not 
written  by  the  men  whose  names  they  bear,  but 
long  after  their  time.  As  a  Hebrew  scholar 
Spinoza  discusses  the  Jewish  Scriptures  in  some 
detail,  showing  in  particular  that  the  Penta- 
teuch is  of  a  later  date  than  Moses.  His  limited 
knowledge  of  Greek  is  offered  as  a  reason  for  not 
handling  the  New  Testament  with  equal  free- 
dom; but  some  contradictions  are  indicated  as 


The  Metaphysicians  59 

disallowing  the  infallibility  claimed  for  it.  At 
the  same  time  the  perfection  of  Christ's  character 
is  fully  acknowledged  and  accepted  as  a  moral 
revelation  of  God. 

Spinoza  shared  to  the  fullest  extent,  and  even 
went  beyond,  Descartes 's  ambition  to  recon- 
struct philosophy  on  a  mathematical  basis. 
The  idea  may  have  come  to  him  from  the  French 
thinker,  but  it  is  actually  of  much  older  origin, 
being  derived  from  Plato,  the  leading  spirit  of  the 
Renaissance,  as  Aristotle  had  been  the  oracle  of 
the  later  Middle  Ages.  Now  Plato's  ideal  had 
been  to  construct  a  philosophy  transcending  the 
assumptions — or,  as  he  calls  them,  the  hypo- 
theses— of  geometry  as  much  as  those  assump- 
tions transcend  the  demonstrations  of  geometry ; 
and  this  also  was  the  ideal  of  Spinoza.  Descartes 
had  been  content  to  accept  from  tradition  his 
ultimate  realities,  Thought,  Extension,  and  God, 
without  showing  that  they  must  necessarily  exist ; 
for  his  proof  of  God's  existence  starts  from  an 
idea  in  the  human  mind,  while  Thought  and  Ex- 
tension are  not  deduced  at  all. 

To  appreciate  the  work  of  the  Hebrew  philo- 
sopher, of  the  lonely  muser,  bred  in  the  religion 
of  Jahveh — a  name  traditionally  interpreted  as 
the  very  expression  of  absolute  self -existence — 
we  must  conceive  him  as  starting  with  a  question 
deeper  even  than  the  Cartesian  doubt,  asking  not 
How  can  I  know  what  is?  but  Why  should  there 


60  Modern  Philosophy 

be  anything  whatever?  And  the  answer,  di- 
vested of  scholastic  terminology,  is:  Because 
it  is  inconceivable  that  there  should  be  nothing, 
and  if  there  is  anything  there  must  be  every- 
thing. This  universe  of  things,  which  must 
also  be  everlasting,  Spinoza  calls  God. 

The  philosophy  or  religion —  for  it  is  both — 
which  identifies  God  with  the  totality  of  exist- 
ence was  of  long  standing  in  Greece,  and  had 
been  elaborated  in  systematic  detail  by  the 
Stoics.  It  has  been  known  for  the  last  two 
centuries  under  the  name  of  Pantheism,  a  word 
of  Greek  etymology,  but  not  a  creation  of  the 
Greeks  themselves,  and,  indeed,  of  more  modern 
date  than  Spinoza.  Historians  always  speak  of 
him  as  a  Pantheist,  and  there  is  no  reason  to 
think  that  he  would  have  objected  to  the 
designation  had  it  been  current  during  his  life- 
time. But  there  are  important  points  of  dis- 
tinction between  him  and  those  who  preceded  or 
followed  him  in  the  same  speculative  direction. 
The  Stoics  differed  from  him  in  being  materi- 
alists. To  them  reality  and  corporeality  were 
convertible  terms.  It  seems  likely  that  Hobbes 
and  his  contemporary,  the  atomist  Gassendi, 
were  of  the  same  opinion,  although  they  did 
not  say  it  in  so  many  words.  But  Descartes 
was  a  strong  spiritualist;  and  Spinoza  followed 
the  master's  lead  so  far,  at  any  rate,  as  to  give 
Thought  at  least  equal  reality  with  matter, 


The  Metaphysicians  61 

which  he  also  identified  with  Extension.  It  has 
been  seen  what  difficulties  were  created  by  the 
radical  Cartesian  antithesis  between  Thought 
and  Extension,  or — to  call  them  by  their  more 
familiar  names — mind  and  body,  when  taken 
together  with  the  intimate  association  shown  by 
experience  to  obtain  between  them;  and  also 
how  Geulincx  and  Malebranche  were  led  on  by 
the  very  spirit  of  philosophy  itself  almost  to  sub- 
merge the  two  disparate  substances  in  the  all- 
absorbing  agency  of  God.  The_  obvious  course, 
then,  for  Spinoza,  being  unfettered  by  the  obli- 
gations of  any  Christian  creed,  was  to  take  the 
last  remaining  step,  to  resolve  the  dualism  of 
Thought  and  Extension  into  the  unity  of  the 
divine  substance. 

In  fact,  the  Hebrew  philosopher  does  this, 
declaring  boldly  that  Thought  and  Extension 
are  one  and  the  same  thing — which  thing  is 
God,  the  only  true  reality  of  which  they  are 
merely  appearances.  And,  so  far,  he  has  had 
many  followers  who  strive  to  harmonise  the 
opposition  of  what  we  now  call  subject  and  ob- 
ject in  the  synthesis  of  the  All-One.  But  he 
goes  beyond  this,  expanding  the  conception  of 
God — or  the  Absolute — to  a  degree  undreamed 
of  by  any  religion  or  philosophy  formulated  be- 
fore or  after  his  time.  God,  Spinoza  tells  us, 
is  '  'a  Substance  consisting  of  infinite  attributes, 
each  of  which  expresses  his  absolute  and  eternal 


62  Modern  Philosophy 

essence.'*  But  of  these  attributes  two  alone, 
Thought  and  Extension,  are  known  to  us  at  pres- 
ent, so  that  our  ignorance  infinitely  exceeds  our 
knowledge  of  reality.  His  extant  writings  do  not 
explain  by  what  process  he  mounted  to  this,  the 
most  dizzy  height  of  speculation  ever  attained  by 
man;  but,  in  the  absence  of  definite  information, 
some  guiding  considerations  suggest  themselves 
as  probable. 

Bruno,  whom  Spinoza  is  held,  on  strong 
grounds,  to  have  read,  identified  God  with  the 
supreme  unifying  principle  of  a  universe  ex- 
tending through  infinite  space.  Descartes,  on 
the  other  hand,  conceived  God  as  a  thinking 
rather  than  as  an  extended  substance.  But  his 
school  tended,  as  we  saw,  to  conceive  God  as 
mediating  between  mind  and  body  in  a  way  that 
suggested  their  real  union  through  his  power. 
Furthermore,  the  habit  common  to  all  Cartesians 
of  regarding  geometrical  reasoning  as  the  most 
perfect  form  of  thought  inevitably  led  to  the 
conception  of  thought  as  accompanying  space 
wherever  it  went — in  fact,  as  stretching  like  it  to 
infinity.  Again,  from  the  Cartesian  point  of 
view,  that  Extension  which  is  the  very  essence 
of  the  material  world,  while  it  covers  space,  is 
more  than  mere  space;  it  includes  not  only 
co-existence,  but  succession  or  time — that  is, 
scientifically  speaking,  the  eternal  sequence  of 
physical  causes;  or,  theologically  speaking,  the 


The  Metaphysicians  63 

creative  activity  of  God.  And  reason  or  thought 
had  also  since  Aristotle  been  more  or  less  iden- 
tified with  the  law  of  universal  causation  no  less 
than  with  the  laws  of  geometry. 

Thus,  then,  the  ground  was  prepared  for 
Spinoza,  as  a  pantheistic  monist,  to  conceive 
God  under  the  two  attributes  of  Extension 
and  Thought,  each  in  its  own  way  disclosing 
his  essence  as  no  other  than  infinite  Power. 
But  why  should  God  have,  or  consist  of, 
two  attributes  and  no  more?  There  is  a  good 
reason  why  we  should  know  only  those  two. 
It  is  that  we  are  ourselves  modes  of  Thought 
united  to  modes  of  Extension,  of  which  our 
thoughts  are  the  revealing  ideas.  But  it  would 
be  gross  anthropomorphism  to  impose  the  limi- 
tations of  our  knowledge  on  the  infinite  be- 
ing of  God,  manifested  through  those  very 
attributes  as  unlimited  Power.  The  infinite  of 
co-existence,  which  is  space,  the  infinite  of 
causal  procession,  which  is  time,  suggest  an 
infinity  of  unimaginable  but  not  inconceivable 
attributes  of  which  the  one  divine  substance 
consists.  And  here  at  last  we  get  the  explanation 
of  why  there  should  be  such  things  as  Thought 
and  Extension  at  all.  They  are  there  simply 
because  everything  is.  If  I  grant  anything — 
and  I  must,  at  least,  grant  myself — I  grant 
existence,  which,  having  nothing  outside  itself 
must  fill  up  all  the  possibilities  of  being  which 
only  exclude  the  self-contradictory  from  their 


64  Modern  Philosophy 

domain.  Thus,  the  philosophy  of  Spinoza 
neither  obliges  him  to  believe  in  the  monsters  of 
mythology  nor  in  the  miracles  of  Scripture,  nor 
in  the  dogmas  of  Catholic  theology,  nor  even  in 
free-will;  nor,  again,  would  it  oblige  him  to  reject 
by  anticipation  the  marvels  of  modern  science. 
For,  according  to  him,  the  impossibility  of  really 
incredible  things  could  be  deduced  with  the 
certainty  of  mathematical  demonstration  from 
the  law  of  contradiction  itself. 

Hegel  has  given  the  name  of  acosmism,  or 
negation  of  the  world,  to  this  form  of  pantheism, 
interpreting  it  as  a  doctrine  that  absorbs  all 
concrete  reality  and  individuality  in  the  absolute 
unity  of  the  divine  essence.  No  misconception 
could  be  more  complete.  Differentiation  is  the 
very  soul  of  Spinoza's  system.  It  is,  indeed, 
more  open  to  the  charge  of  excessive  disper- 
sion than  of  excessive  centralisation.  Power, 
which  is  God's  essence,  means  no  more  than  the 
realisation  through  all  eternity  of  all  possibilities 
of  existence,  with  no  end  or  aim  but  just  the 
process  of  infinite  production  itself.  There  is, 
indeed,  a  nominal  identification  between  the 
material  processes  of  Extension  and  the  ideal 
processes  of  Thought.  But  this  amonts  to  no 
more  than  a  re-statement  in  abstract  terms  of  the 
empirical  truth  that  there  is  a  close  connection 
between  body  'and  mind.  Like  the  double- 
aspect  theory,  the  parallelistic  theory,  the  ma- 


The  Metaphysicians  65 

terialistic  theory,  the  theory  of  interaction,  and 
the  theory  of  more  or  less  complete  reciprocal 
independence,  it  is  a  mere  verbalism,  telling  us 
nothing  that  we  did  not  know  before.  Or,  if 
there  is  more,  it  consists  of  the  very  questionable 
assumption  that  body  and  mind  must  come  in 
somewhere  to  fill  up  what  would  otherwise  be 
blank  possibilities  of  existence.  And  this,  like 
other  metaphysical  assumptions,  is  an  ille- 
gitimate generalisation  from  experience.  The 
ideas  of  space  and  time  as  filled-up  continua 
supply  the  model  on  which  the  whole  universe 
must  be  constructed.  Like  them,  it  must  be 
infinite  and  eternal,  but,  so  to  speak,  at  a  higher 
power;  as  in  them,  every  part  must  be  deter- 
mined by  the  position  of  all  other  parts,  with 
the  determination  put  at  a  logical  instead  of 
at  a  descriptive  value;  corresponding  to  their 
infinitely  varied  differentiation  of  position  and 
quantity,  there  must  be  an  infinite  differentiation 
of  concrete  content ;  and,  finally,  the  laws  of  the 
universe  must  be  demonstrable  by  the  same  a 
priori  mathematical  method  that  has  been  so 
successfully  applied  to  continuous  quantity. 

The  geometrical  form  into  which  Spinoza 
has  thrown  his  philosophy  unfortunately  re- 
stricts the  number  of  readers — always  rather 
small — that  it  might  otherwise  attract.  People 
feel  themselves  mystified,  wearied,  and  cheated 
by  the  appearance,  without  the  reality,  of  logical 


66  Modern  Philosophy 

demonstration;  and  the  repulsion  is  aggravated 
by  the  barbarous  scholasticism  with  which — un- 
like Bacon,  Hobbes,  and  Descartes — he  peppers 
his  pages.  Yet,  like  the  Greek  philosophers,  he 
is  much  more  modern,  more  on  the  true  line  of 
developing  thought  than  they  are.  But  to  get 
at  the  true  kernel  of  his  teaching  we  must,  like 
Goethe,  disregard  the  logical  husks  in  which  it  is 
wrapped  up.  And,  as  it  happens,  Spinoza  has 
greatly  facilitated  this  operation  by  printing  his 
most  interesting  and  suggestive  discussions  in 
the  form  of  Scholia,  Explanations,  and  Appen- 
dices. Even  these  are  not  easy  reading;  but,  to 
quote  his  own  pathetic  words,  "If  the  way  of 
salvation  lay  ready  to  hand,  and  could  be  found 
without  great  toil,  would  it  be  neglected  by 
nearly  everyone?  But  all  glorious  things  are 
as  difficult  as  they  are  rare." 

Some  of  his  expositors  have  called  Spinoza  a 
mystic;  and  his  philosophy  has  been  traced,  in 
part  at  least,  to  the  mystical  pantheism  of 
certain  medieval  Jews.  In  my  opinion  this  is  a 
mistake;  and  I  will  now  proceed  to  show  that  the 
phrases  on  which  it  rests  are  open  to  an  inter- 
pretation more  consistent  with  the  rational 
foundations  of  the  whole  system. 

The  things  that  have  done  most  to  fasten  the 
character  of  a  mystic  on  Spinoza  are  his  identi- 
fication of  virtue  with  the  knowledge  and  love  of 
God,  and  his  theory — so  suggestive  of  Christ- 


The  Metaphysicians  «     67 

ian  theology  at  its  highest  flight — that  God 
loves  himself  with  an  infinite  love.  That,  like 
Plato  and  Matthew  Arnold,  he  should  value 
religion  as  a  means  of  popular  moralisation  might 
seem  natural  enough;  but  not,  except  from 
a  mystical  motive,  that  he  should  apparently 
value  morality  merely  as  a  help  to  the  religious 
life.  On  examination,  however,  it  appears  that 
the  beatific  vision  of  this  pantheist  offers  no  ex- 
perience going  beyond  the  limits  of  nature  and 
reason.  Since  God  and  the  universe  are  one,  to 
know  God  is  to  know  that  we  are,  body  and 
soul,  necessary  modes  of  the  two  attributes, 
Extension  and  Thought,  by  which  the  infinite 
Power  which  is  the  essence  of  the  universe  ex- 
presses itself  for  us.  To  love  God  is  to  recognise 
our  own  vitality  as  a  portion  of  that  power,  wel- 
coming it  with  grateful  joy  as  a  gift  from  the 
universe  whence  we  come.  And  to  say  that 
God  loves  himself  with  an  infinite  love  is  merely 
to  say  that  the  attribute  of  Thought  eternally 
divides  itself  among  an  infinity  of  thinking 
beings,  through  whose  activity  the  universe 
keeps  up  a  delighted  consciousness  of  itself. 

Spinoza  declares  by  the  very  name  of  his  great 
work  that  for  him  the  philosophical  problem  is 
essentially  a  problem  of  ethics,  being,  indeed,  no 
other  than  the  old  question,  first  started  by 
Plato,  how  to  reconcile  disinterestedness  with 
self-interest;  and  his  metaphysical  system  is 


68  Modern  Philosophy 

really  an  elaborate  mechanism  for  proving  that, 
on  the  profoundest  interpretation,  their  claims 
coincide.  His  great  contemporary,  Hobbes,  had 
taught  that  the  fundamental  impulse  of  human 
nature  is  the  will  for  power ;  and  Spinoza  accepts 
this  idea  to  the  fullest  extent  in  proclaiming 
Power  to  be  the  very  stuff  of  which  we  and  all 
other  things  are  made.  But  he  parts  company 
with  the  English  philospher  in  his  theory  of  what 
it  means.  On  his  view  it  is  an  utter  illusion  to 
suppose  that  to  gratify  such  passions  as  pride, 
avarice,  vanity,  and  lust  is  to  acquire  or  exer- 
cise power.  For  strength  means  freedom,  self- 
determination;  and  no  man  can  be  free  whose 
happiness  depends  on  a  fortuitous  combination 
of  external  circumstances,  or  on  the  consent  of 
other  persons  whose  desires  are  such  as  to  set  up 
a  conflict  between  his  gratification  and  theirs. 
Real  power  means  self-realisation,  the  exercise 
of  that  faculty  which  is  most  purely  human — 
that  is  to  say,  of  Thought  under  the  form  of 
reason. 

In  pleading  for  the  subordination  of  the  self- 
seeking  desires  to  reason  Spinoza  repeats  the 
lessons  of  moral  philosophy  in  all  ages  and 
countries  since  its  first  independent  constitution. 
In  connecting  the  interests  of  morality. with  the 
interests  of  science  as  such,  he  follows  the  tradi- 
tion of  Athenian  thought.  In  interpreting 
pantheism  as  an  ethical  enthusiasm  of  the 


The  Metaphysicians  69 

universe  he  returns  to  the  creed  of  Stoicism, 
and  strikes  the  keynote  of  Wordsworth's  loftiest 
poetry.  In  fixing  each  man's  place  in  nature  as 
one  among  the  infinite  individuations  of  divine 
power  he  repeats  another  Stoic  idea — with  this 
difference,  however,  that  among  the  Stoics  it 
was  intimately  associated  with  their  teleology, 
with  the  doctrine  that  everything  in  nature  has 
a  function  without  whose  performance  the 
universe  would  not  be  complete ;  whereas  Spinoza 
following  Bacon  and  Descartes,  utterly  abjures 
final  causes  as  an  anthropomorphism,  an  in- 
trusion of  human  interests  into  a  universe  whose 
sole  perfection  is  to  exhaust  the  possibilities  of 
existence.  And  herein  lies  his  justification 
of  evil  which  the  Stoics  could  only  defend  on 
aesthetic  grounds  as  enhancing  the  beauty  of 
moral  heroism  by  contrast  and  conflict.  "If  I 
am  asked,"  he  says,  "why  God  did  not  create 
all  men  of  such  a  character  as  to  be  guided  by 
reason  alone,  my  answer  is  because  he  had 
materials  enough  to  create  all  things  from  the 
highest  to  the  lowest  degree  of  perfection." 
Perfection  with  him  meaning  reality,  this  account 
of  evil — and  of  error  also — points  to  the  theory  of 
degrees  of  reality,  revived  and  elaborated  in  our 
own  time  by  Mr.  F.  H.  Bradley,  involving  a 
correlative  theory  of  illusion.  Now,  the  idea 
of  illusion,  although  older  than  Plato,  was  first 
applied  on  a  great  scale  in  Plato's  philosophy,  of 


70  Modern  Philosophy 

whose  influence  on  seventeenth-century  thought 
this  is  not  the  only  example.  We  shall  find  it  to 
some  extent  countervailed  by  a  revived  Aristo- 
telian current  in  the  work  of  the  metaphysician 
who  now  remains  to  be  considered. 

Leibniz 

G.  W.  Leibniz  (1646-1716),  son  of  a  professor 
at  the  University  of  Leipzig,  is  marked  by  some 
of  the  distinguishing  intellectual  characters  of  the 
German  genius.  Far  more  truly  than  Francis 
Bacon,  this  man  took  all  knowledge  for  his 
province.  At  once  a  mathematician,  a  physicist, 
a  historian,  a  metaphysician,  and  a  diplomatist, 
he  went  to  the  bottom  of  whatever  subject  he 
touched,  and  enriched  all  his  multifarious  studies 
with  new  views  or  with  new  facts.  And  as  with 
other  great  countrymen  of  his,  the  final  end  of 
all  this  curiosity  and  interest  was  to  combine 
and  reconcile.  One  of  his  ambitions  was  to 
create  a  universal  language  of  philosophy,  by 
whose  means  its  problems  were  to  be  made  a 
matter  of  mathematical  demonstration;  another 
to  harmonise  ancient  with  modern  speculation;  a 
third — the  most  chimerical  of  all — to  compose 
the  differences  between  Rome  and  Protestantism ; 
a  fourth — partly  realised  long  after  his  time — to 
unite  the  German  Calvinists  with  the  Lutherans. 
In  politics  he  tried,  with  equal  unsuccess,  to 
build  up  a  Confederation  of  the  Rhine  as  a 


The  Metaphysicians  71 

barrier  against  Louis  XIV.,  and  to  divert  the 
ambition  of  Louis  himself  from  encroachments 
on  his  neighbours  to  the  conquest  of  Egypt. 

It  seems  probable  that  no  intellect  of  equal 
power  was  ever  applied  in  modern  times  to  the 
service  of  philosophy.  And  this  power  is  de- 
monstrated, not,  as  with  other  metaphysicians,  by 
constructions  of  more  or  less  contestable  value, 
however  dazzling  the  ingenuity  they  may  dis- 
play, but  by  contributions  of  the  first  order  to 
positive  science.  It  is  now  agreed  that  Leibniz^ 
discovered  the  differential  calculus  independently 
of  Newton;  and,  what  is  more,  that  the  formu- 
lation by  which  alone  it  has  been  made  available 
for  fruitful  application  was  his  exclusive  in- 
vention. In  physics  he  is  a  pioneer  of  the  con- 
servation of  energy.  In  geology  he  starts  the 
theory  that  our  planet  began  as  a  glowing  molten 
mass  derived  from  the  sun;  and  the  modern 
theory  of  evolution  is  a  special  application  of  his 
theory  of  development. 

Intellect  alone,  however,  does  not  make  a 
great  philosopher;  character  also  is  required; 
and  Leibniz's  character  was  quite  unworthy  of 
his  genius.  Ambitious  and  avaricious,  a  courtier 
and  a  time-server,  he  neither  made  truth  for  its 
own  sake  a  paramount  object,  nor  would  he 
keep  on  terms  with  those  who  cherished  a  nobler 
ideal.  After  cultivating  Spinoza's  acquaint- 
ance, he  joined  in  the  cry  of  obloquy  raised  after 


72  Modern  Philosophy 

his  death,  and  was  mean  enough  to  stir  up 
religious  prejudice  against  Newton's  theory  of 
gravitation.  Of  the  calamity  that  embittered 
his  closing  days  we  may  say  with  confidence  that 
it  could  not  possibly  have  befallen  Spinoza.  On 
the  accession  of  the  Elector  of  Hanover  to  the 
English  crown  as  George  I.,  Leibniz  sought  for 
an  invitation  to  the  Court  of  St.  James.  Ap- 
parently the  prince  had  not  found  him  very 
satisfactory  as  a  State  official,  and  had  reason  to 
believe  that  Leibniz  would  have  liked  to  exchange 
his  office  of  historiographer  at  Hanover  for  a 
better  appointment  at  Vienna.  Greatness  in 
other  departments  could  not  recommend  one 
whom  he  knew  only  as  a  negligent  and  perhaps 
unfaithful  servant  to  the  favour  of  such  an  illiter- 
ate master.  Anyhow,  the  English  appointment 
was  withheld,  and  the  worn-out  encyolopasdist 
succumbed  to  disease  and  vexation  combined. 
The  only  mourner  at  his  funeral  was  his  secre- 
tary, Eckhardt,  who  hastened  to  solicit  the 
reversion  of  the  offices  left  vacant  by  his  chief's 
decease. 

A  single  theory  of  Leibniz  has  attained  more 
celebrity  than  any  one  utterance  of  any  other 
philosopher;  but  that  fame  is  due  to  the  undying 
fire  in  which  it  has  been  enveloped  by  the  mock- 
ing irony  of  Voltaire.  Everything  is  for  the 
best  in  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds.  Such  is 
the  famous  text  as  a  satire  on  which  Candide  was 


The  Metaphysicians  73 

composed.  Yet  whatever  value  Voltaire's  ob- 
jections to  optimism  may  possess  tells  nearly  as 
much  against  Voltaire  himself  as  against  his  un- 
fortunate butt.  For,  after  all,  believing  as  he 
did  in  a  God  who  combined  omnipotence  with 
perfect  goodness  he  could  not  any  more  than 
Leibniz  evade  the  obligation  of  reconciling  the 
divine  character  with  the  divine  work.  On  a 
priori  grounds  the  German  philosopher  seems 
to  have  an  incontrovertible  case.  A  perfect 
Being  must  have  made  the  best  possible  world. 
The  only  question  is  what  we  mean  by  goodness 
and  by  possibility.  Spinoza  had  solved  the 
problem  by  identifying  goodness  with  existence. 
It  is  enough  that  the  things  we  call  evil  are  pos- 
sible ;  the  infinite  Power  of  nature  would  be  a 
self-contradiction  were  they  not  realised.  Leib- 
niz rejects  the  pantheistic  position  in  terms,  but 
nearly  admits  it  in  practice.  Evil  for  him  means 
imperfection,  and  if  God  ma"de  a  world  at  all  it 
was  bound  to  be  imperfect.  The  next  step  was 
to^call  pain  an  imperfection,  which  suggests  a 
serious  logical  deficiency  in  the  optimist;  for, 
although  in  certain  circumstances  the  production 
of  pain  argues  imperfection  in  the  operator,  we 
are  not  entitled  to  argue  that  wherever  there  is 
pain  there  must  be  imperfection.  Another  plea 
is  the  necessity  of  pain  as  a  punishment  for 
crime,  or,  more  generally,  as  a  result  of  moral 
freedom.  Such  an  argument  is  open  only  to  the 


74  Modern  Philosophy 

believers  in  free-will.  A  world  of  free  and  re- 
sponsible agents,  they  urge,  is  infinitely  more 
valuable  than  a  world  of  automata;  and  it  is  not 
too  dearly  purchased  even  at  the  cost  of  such  suf- 
fering as  we  witness.  The  argument  is  not  very 
convincing;  for  liberty  of  choice  in  a  painless 
world  is  quite  conceivable.  But,  be  it  a  good  or 
bad  argument,  although  it  might  appeal  to  Vol- 
taire, who  believed  in  free-will,  it  could  not 
decently  be  used  by  Leibniz,  who  was  a  deter- 
minist  of  the  strictest  type.  To  make  this  clear 
we  must  now  turn  to  his  metaphysical  system. 

Bacon,  Descartes,  and  Spinoza,  disagreeing 
widely  on  other  subjects,  were  agreed  in  dis- 
countenancing the  study  of  final  causes:  Bacon, 
apparently,  from  dislike  of  the  idea  that  the 
perfect  adaptation  of  all  things  to  the  service  of 
man  rendered  superfluous  any  efforts  to  make 
them  more  serviceable  still ;  Descartes  from  his 
devotion  to  the  mathematical  method  which  was 
more  applicable  to  a  system  of  mechanical 
causation;  Spinoza  for  the  same  reason,  and  also 
from  his  disbelief  in  a  personal  God.  Leibniz, 
on  the  contrary,  felt  deeply  impressed  by  a  famous 
passage  in  Plato's  Ph&do,  where  Socrates,  op- 
posing the  philosophy  of  teleology  to  the  philo- 
sophy of  mechanism,  desiderates  an  explanation 
of  nature  as  designed  with  a  view  to  the  highest 
good.  But  Leibniz  did  not  go  so  far  as  Plato. 
Mediating  between  the  two  methods,  he  taught 


The  Metaphysicians  75 

that  all  is  done  for  the  best,  but  also  that  all  is 
done  through  an  unbroken  series  of  efficient 
causes.  At  the  same  time,  these  causes  are  only 
material  in  appearance ;  in  reality  they  are  spirit- 
ual beings.  There  is  no  such  thing  as  dead 
matter;  the  universe  consists  of  living  forces  all 
through.  The  general  idea  of  force  probably 
came  from  that  infinite  Power  of  which,  accord- 
ing to  Spinoza,  the  whole  universe  is  at  once 
the  product  and  the  expression;  or  it  may  have 
been  suggested  by  Plato's  incidental  identifica- 
tion of  Being  with  Action.  But  Leibniz  found 
his  type  of  force  in  human  personality,  which 
following  the  lead  of  Aristotle  rather  than  of 
Plato,  he  conceived  as  an  Entelechy,  or  realised 
Actuality,  and  a  First  Substance.  After  years 
of  anxious  reflection  he  chose  the  far  happier 
name  of  Monad,  a  term  originally  coined  by 
Bruno,  but  not,  as  would  appear,  directly  bor- 
rowed from  him  by  the  German  metaphysician. 
According  to  Leibniz,  the  monads  or  ultimate 
elements  of  existence  are  constituted  by  the  two 
essential  properties  of  psychic  life,  perception  and 
appetency.  In  this  connection  two  points  have 
to  be  made  clear.  What  he  calls  bare  monads — 
i.  e.,  the  components  of  what  is  known  as  in- 
organic matter — although  percipient,  are  not  con- 
scious of  their  perceptions;  in  his  language  they 
do  not  apperceive.  And  he  endeavours  to  prove 
that  such  a  mentality  is  possible  by  a  reference 


76  Modern  Philosophy 

to  our  own  experience.  We  hear  the  roaring  of 
waves  on  the  seashore,  but  we  do  not  hear  the 
sound  made  by  the  falling  of  each  particle  of 
water.  And  yet  we  certainly  must  perceive  it 
in  some  way  or  other,  since  the  total  volume  of 
sound  is  made  up  of  those  inaudible  impacts. 
He  overlooks  the  conceivable  alternative  that 
the  immediate  antecedent  of  our  auditory  sensa- 
tions is  a  cerebral  disturbance,  and  that  this 
must  attain  a  certain  volume  in  order  to  produce 
an  effect  on  our  consciences.  The  other  point 
is  that  the  appetency  of  a  monad  does  not  mean 
an  active  impulse,  but  a  search  for  more  and 
more  perceptions,  a  continuous  widening  of  its 
cognitive  range.  In  short,  each  monad  is  a 
little  Leibniz  for  ever  increasing  the  sum  of  its 
knowledge. 

At  no  stage  does  that  knowledge  come  from 
experience.  The  monad  has  no  windows,  no 
communication  of  any  kind  with  the  external 
world.  But  each  reflects  the  whole  universe, 
knowing  what  it  knows  by  mere  introspection. 
And  each  reflects  all  the  others  at  a  different 
angle,  the  angles  varying  from  one  another  by 
infinitesimal  degrees,  so  that  in  their  totality 
they  form  a  continuous  series  of  differentiated 
individuals.  And  the  same  law  of  infinitesimal 
differentiation  is  observed  by  the  series  of 
progressive  changes  through  which  the  monads 
are  ever  passing,  so  that  they  keep  exact  step, 


The  Metaphysicians  77 

the  continuity  of  existence  being  unbroken  in  the 
order  of  succession  as  in  the  order  of  co-existence. 
Evidently  there  is  no  place  for  free-will  in  such 
a  system;  and  that  Leibniz,  with  his  relentless 
fatalism,  should  not  only  admit  the  eternal 
punishment  of  predestined  sinners,  but  even 
defend  it  as  morally  appropriate,  obliges  us  to 
condemn  his  theology  as  utterly  irrational  or 
utterly  insincere. 

In  this  system  animal  and  human  souls  are 
conceived  as  monads  of  superior  rank  occupying 
a  central  and  commanding  position  among  a 
multitude  of  inferior  monads  constituting  what 
we  call  their  bodies,  and  changing  pari  passu 
with  them,  the  correspondence  of  their  respective 
states  being,  according  to  Leibniz,  of  such  a  pecu- 
liarly intimate  character  that  the  phenomena  of 
sensation  and  volition  seem  to  result  from  a 
causal  reaction,  instead  of  from  a  mechanical 
adjustment  such  as  we  can  imagine  to  exist 
between  two  clocks  so  constructed  and  set  as 
to  strike  the  same  hour  at  the  same  time.  This 
theory  of  the  relations  between  body  and  soul 
is  known  to  philosophy  as  the  system  of  pre- 
established  harmony. 

It  may  be  asked  how  every  monad  can  possibly 
reflect  every  other  monad  when  we  do  not  know 
what  is  passing  in  our  own  bodies,  still  less  what 
is  passing  all  over  the  universe.  The  answer 
consists  in  a  convenient  distinction  between  clear 


7$  Modern  Philosophy 

and  confused  perceptions,  the  one  constituting 
our  actual  and  the  other  our  potential  know- 
ledge. A  more  difficult  problem  is  to  explain 
how  any  particular  monad — Leibniz  or  another — 
can  consistently  be  a  monadologist  rather  than  a 
solipsist  believing  only  in  its  own  existence. 
Here,  as  usual,  the  Deus  ex  Machine,  comes  in. 
Following  Descartes,  I  think  of  God  as  a  perfect 
Being  whose  idea  involves  his  existence,  with, 
of  course,  the  power,  will,  and  wisdom  to 
create  the  best  possible  world — a  universe  of 
monads — which,  again,  by  its  perfect  mutual 
adjustments,  proves  that  there  is  a  God.  A 
more  serious,  and  indeed  absolutely  insuperable, 
objection  arises  from  the  definition  of  the  monads 
nothing  but  mutually  reflecting  entities.  For 
even .  an  infinity  of  little  mirrors  with  nothing 
but  each  other  to  reflect  must  at  once  collapse 
into  absolute  vacuity.  And  with  their  dis- 
appearance their  creator  also  disappears.  God, 
the  supreme  monad,  we  are  told,  has  only  clear 
perceptions ;  but  the  clearness  is  of  no  avail  when 
he  has  nothing  to  perceive  but  an  absolute  blank. 
Leibniz  rejected  the  objectivity  of  time  and 
space ;  yet  the  hollow  infinity  of  those  blank  forms 
seems,  in  his  philosophy,  to  have  reached  the 
consciousness  of  itself^ 


CHAPTER  III 

THE    THEORISTS    OF    KNOWLEDGE 

Locke,  Berkeley,  Hume,  Kant 

EPISTEMOLOGY,  or  theory  of  knowledge, 
did  not  begin  in  modern  times.  Among  the 
Greeks  it  goes  back,  at  least,  to  Empedocles,  and 
figures  largely  in  the  programmes  of  the  later 
schools.  And  Descartes 's  universal  doubt  seems  to 
give  the  question,  How  can  we  be  sure  of  any- 
thing? a  foremost  place  in  speculation.  But  the 
singular  assurance  with  which  the  Cartesian 
metaphysicians  presented  their  adventurous  hy- 
potheses as  demonstrated  certainties  showed 
that  with  them  the  test  of  truth  meant  whatever 
told  for  that  which,  on  other  grounds,  they  be- 
lieved to  be  true.  In  reality,  the  thing  they 
called  reason  was  hardly  more  than  a  covert 
appeal  to  authority,  a  suggestion  that  the  duty 
of  philosophy  was  to  reconcile  old  beliefs  with 
new.  And  the  last  great  dogmatist,  Leibniz, 
was  the  one  who  practised  this  method  of  un- 
critical assumption  to  the  utmost  extent. 
.  79 


8o  Modern  Philosophy 

Locke 

It  is  the  peculiar  glory  of  John  Locke  (1632- 
1704)  to  have  resumed  that  method  of  doubt 
which  Descartes  had  attempted,  but  which  his 
dogmatic  prepossessions  had  falsified  almost  at 
the  first  start.  This  illustrious  thinker  is  memor- 
able not  only  for  his  services  to  speculation,  but 
for  the  example  of  a  genuinely  philosophic  life 
entirely  devoted  to  truth  and  good — a  character 
in  which  personal  sweetness,  simplicity,  and 
charm  were  combined  with  strenuous,  disinter- 
ested, and  fearless  devotion  to  the  service  of  the 
State.  Locke  was  a  Whig  when  Whiggism  meant 
advanced  Liberalism  in  religion  and  politics,  and 
when  that  often  meant  a  choice  between  exile  and 
death.  Thus,  after  the  fall  of  his  patron,  Lord 
Shaftesbury,  the  philosopher  had  to  take  refuge 
in  Holland,  remaining  there  for  some  years,  lying 
hid  even  there  for  some  time  to  escape  an  extra- 
dition order  for  which  the  Government  of  James 
II.  had  applied.  It  was  in  Holland  that  he  wrote 
the  Essay  Concerning  Human  Understanding. 

This  revolutionist  in  thought  was  no  solitary 
recluse,  but,  in  the  best  sense,  a  thorough  man 
of  the  world.  Educated  at  Westminster  and 
Christ  Church,  he  had,  in  the  German  poet's 
phrase,  the  supreme  happiness  of  combining 
the  seriousness  of  an  enthusiast  with  the  sagacity 
of  a  statesman,  so  that  great  statesmen  recog- 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  81 

nised  him  as  one  of  themselves.  With  the 
triumph  of  the  Whig  cause  at  a  time  when 
diplomacy  demanded  the  utmost  tact  and  skill, 
it  was  proposed  to  send  Locke  as  Ambassador 
to  the  Court  of  Brandenburg,  and,  as  that 
would  not  have  suited  his  sober  habits,  to 
the  Court  of  Vienna.  Weak  health  obliging 
him  to  decline  this  also,  he  received  office 
in  the  Ministry  at  home,  taking  a  depart- 
ment where  business  talents  were  eminently 
required.  In  that  capacity  he  bore  a  leading 
part  in  the  restoration  of  the  coinage,  besides 
inspiring  the  Toleration  Act  and  the  Act  for 
Unlicensed  Printing.  Even  the  wisest  men 
make  mistakes;  and  it  must  be  noticed  with 
regret  that  Locke's  theory  of  toleration  excluded 
Roman  Catholics  on  the  one  side  and  atheists  on 
the  other — the  former  because  their  creed  made 
persecution  a  duty,  the  latter  because  their  want 
of  a  creed  left  them  no  sanction  for  any  duties 
whatever.  To  say  that  Locke  had  not  our  ex- 
perience does  not  excuse  him,  for  in  both  cases 
the  expediency  of  toleration  can  be  proved  a 
priori.  Romanists  must  be  expected  to  suppress 
a  heresy  whose  spokesman  declares  that  when  he 
has  the  power  he  will  suppress  their  Church; 
and,  if  atheists  are  without  moral  principle,  they 
will  propagate,  under  cover  of  orthodoxy,  nega- 
tions that  they  are  not  allowed  openly  to  profess. 
Locke  was  brought  up  by  a  Puritan  father; 

6 


82  Modern  Philosophy 

and,  although  in  after  life  he  wandered  far  from 
its  doctrinal  standards,  he  no  doubt  always  re- 
tained a  sense  of  that  close  connection  between 
religion  and  morality  which  Puritanism  implies. 
Telling  about  the  train  of  thought  that  started  his 
great  Essay,  he  refers  it  to  a  conversation  between 
himself  and  some  friends,  in  which  they  "found 
themselves  quickly  at  a  stand  by  the  difficulties 
that  rose  on  every  side'';  and,  according  to  an 
intimate  friend  of  his,  the  discussion  turned  "on 
the  principles  of  morality  and  revealed  religion." 
It  then  occurred  to  him  that  they  should  first 
ascertain  "what  objects  their  understandings 
were  or  were  not  fitted  to  deal  with."  And  the 
mottoes  prefixed  to  the  essay  prove  that  the 
results  were  of  a  decidedly  sceptical  cast.  In- 
deed, his  successors,  though  not  himself,  were 
destined  to  develop  them  into  what  is  now 
called  Agnosticism. 

We  have  further  to  note  that,  while  his  Con- 
tinental rivals  were  mathematicians,  our  English 
philosopher  never  went  deeply  into  mathematics, 
but  was  by  calling  a  physician.  In  this  he  re- 
sembles Aristotle  and  Sextus  Empiricus  among 
the  Greeks;  and  so  it  is  quite  in  order  that,  with 
the  same  sort  of  training,  he  should  adopt  Aris- 
totle's method  of  experience  as  against  Platonic 
transcendentalism,  and  the  sceptical  relativism 
of  Sextus  as  against  the  dogmatism  of  the  schools. 

Locke  begins  his  essay  with  a  vigorous  polemic 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  83 

against  the  doctrine  of  Innate  Ideas.  The 
word  "idea,"  as  he  uses  it,  is  ambiguous,  serving 
to  denote  perceptions,  notions,  and  propositions ; 
but  this  confusion  is  of  no  practical  importance, 
his  object  being  to  show  that  all  our  knowledge 
originates  in  experience;  whereas  the  reigning 
Selief  was  that  at  least  the  first  principles  of 
knowledge  had  a  more  authoritative,  if  not  a 
mystical,  source.  Hobbes  had  been  beforehand 
with  him  in  deriving  every  kind  of  knowledge 
from  experience,  but  had  been  content  to  assume 
his  case ;  whereas  Locke  supports  his  by  a  formid- 
able array  of  proofs.  The  gist  of  his  argument 
is  that  intellectual  and  moral  principles  supposed 
to  be  recognised  by  all  mankind  from  their  in- 
fancy are  admitted  only  by  some,  and  by  those 
only  as  the  result  of  teaching. 

As  we  saw,  the  whole  inquiry  began  with 
questions  about  religion  and  morality;  and  it  is 
precisely  in  reference  to  the  alleged  universality 
and  innateness  of  the  belief  in  God  and  the  moral 
law  that  Locke  is  most  successful.  And  the  more 
modern  anthropology  teaches  us  about  primitive 
man,  the  stronger  becomes  the  case  against  the 
transcendental  side  in  the  controversy.  Where 
his  analysis  breaks  down  is  in  dealing  with  the 
difficult  and  important  ideas  of  Space,  Time, 
Substance,  and  Causality — with  the  fatal  result 
that  such  questions  as,  How  is  experience  itself 
possible?  or,  How  from  a  partial  experience  can 


84  Modern  Philosophy 

we  draw  universal  and  necessary  conclusions? 
find  no  place  in  his  theory  of  knowledge.  Of 
course,  his  contemporaries  are  open  to  the  same 
criticism — nor,  indeed  had  the  time  come  even 
for  the  statement  of  such  problems.  Meanwhile, 
the  facility  with  which  the  founder  of  episte- 
mology  accepts  fallacies,  whence  Spinoza  had 
already  found  his  way  out,  shows  how  little  he 
was  master  of  his  means.  According  to  Locke, 
it  is  "a  certain  and  evident  truth  that  there  is 
an  eternal,  most  powerful,  and  most  knowing 
being,  which  whether  anyone  will  please  to  call 
God  it  matters  not."  On  examination  the  proof 
appears  to  involve  two  unproved  assumptions. 
The  first  is  that  nothing  can  begin  to  exist  with- 
out a  cause.  The  second  is  that  effects  must 
resemble  their  causes.  And  from  these  it  is 
inferred  that  an  all-powerful  being  must  have 
existed  from  all  eternity.  The  alternative  is 
overlooked  that  a  succession  of  more  limited 
beings  would  answer  the  purpose  equally  well, 
while  it  would  also  be  more  consistent  with  our 
experience.  But  a  far  more  fatal  objection  to 
Locke's  theism  results  from  his  second  assump- 
tion. This,  although  not  explicitly  stated,  is 
involved  in  the  assertion  that  for  knowledge  such 
as  we  possess  to  originate  from  things  without 
knowledge  is  impossible.  For,  on  the  same 
principle,  matter  must  have  been  made  by  some- 
thing material,  pain  by  something  that  is  pained, 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  85 

and  evil  by  something  that  is  evil.  It  would 
not  even  be  going  too  far  to  say  that  by  this  logic 
I  myself  must  have  existed  from  all  eternity; 
for  to  say  that  I  was  created  by  a  not-myself 
would  be  to  say  that  something  may  come  from 
nothing. 

We  have  seen  how  Locke  refused  toleration  to 
atheists  on  the  ground  that  their  denial  of  a 
divine  lawgiver  and  judge  destroys  the  basis  of 
morality.  He  did  not,  like  Spinoza,  believe 
that  morality  is  of  the  nature  of  things.  For 
him  it  is  constituted  by  the  will  of  God. 
Possibly,  if  pressed,  he  might  have  explained 
that  what  atheism  denies  is  not  the  rule  of  right, 
but  the  sanction  of  that  rule,  the  fear  of  super- 
natural retribution.  Yet  being,  like  Spinoza  and 
Leibniz,  a  determinist,  he  should  have  seen  that 
a  creator  who  sets  in  motion  the  train  of  causes 
and  effects,  necessarily  resulting. in  what  we  call 
good  or  bad  human  actions,  has  the  same  respon- 
sibility for  those  actions  as  if  he  had  committed 
them  himself.  To  reward  one  of  his  passive 
agents  and  to  punish  another  would  be  grossly 
unjust  and  at  the  same  time  perfectly  useless. 
But  how  do  we  know  that  he  will,  on  any  theory 
of  volition,  reward  the  good  and  punish  the  bad? 
1 1 B  ecause  we  have  hi  s  word  for  it . "  And  how  do 
we  know  that  he  will  keep  his  word?  "Because 
he  is  all-good. "  But  that, 'on  Locke's  principles, 
is  pure  assumption;  and  God,  being  quite  sure 


86  Modern  Philosophy 

that  he  has  no  retribution  to  fear,  must  be  even 
more  irresponsible  than  the  atheist. 

The  principle  that  nothing  can  come  from 
nothing,  so  far  from  proving  theism,  leads  logi- 
cally either  to  pantheism  or  to  a  much  more 
thorough  monadism  than  the  system  of  Leibniz. 
And,  metaphysics  apart,  it  conflicts  with  a 
leading;  doctrine  of  the  essay — that  is,  the  funda- 
mental distinction  between  the  primary  and  the 
secondary  qualities  of  matter.  We  think  of 
bodies  as  in  themselves  extended,  resisting,  and 
mobile,  but  not  in  themselves  as  coloured,  sono- 
rous, odorous,  hot,  cold,  or  sapid.  They  cause 
our  special  sensations,  but  cause  them  by  an 
unknown  power.  Again,  we  perceive — or  think 
we  perceive — both  primary  and  secondary 
qualities  in  close  union  as  properties  of  a  single 
object,  and  this  object  in  which  they  jointly 
inhere  is  called  a  substance.  And  to  the  ques- 
tion, What  is  substance?  Locke  admits  that  he 
has  no  answer  except  something  we  know  not 
what.  He  has  returned  to  the  agnostic  stand- 
point of  the  Cyrenaic  school.  This  something, 
for  aught  we  know,  might  have  created  the  world. 

Continental  historians  regard  the  whole  ra- 
tionalistic movement  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
or  what  in  Germany  is  called  the  Enlightenment 
(Aufklarung),  as  having  been  started  by  Locke. 
But  the  sort  of  arguments  that  he  adduces  for  the 
existence  of  a  God  prove  that  in  theology  at  least 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  87 

his  rationalism  had  rather  narrow  limits.  Both 
his  theism  and  his  acceptance  of  Christianity, 
on  the  evidence  of  prophecy  and  miracles, 
show  no  advance  on  medieval  logic.  In  this 
respect  Spinoza  and  Bayle  (1622-1709)  were 
far  more  in  line  with  the  modern  movement. 
Still,  assuming  Scripture  as  an  authoritative 
revelation,  Locke  shows  that,  rationally  inter- 
preted, it  yields  much  less  support  to  dogmatic 
orthodoxy  than  English  Churchmen  supposed. 
And  whatever  may  have  been  the  letter  of  his 
religious  teaching,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that 
the  English  Deists,  Toland,  Shaftesbury,  and 
Anthony  Collins  represented  its  true  spirit  more 
faithfully  than  the  philosopher  himself. 

Representative  government  and  the  sub- 
ordination of  ecclesiastical  to  secular  authority— 
or,  better  still,  their  separation — are  both  good 
things  in  themselves  and  favourable  conditions 
to  the  life  of  reason.  Another  condition  is  that 
children  should  be  trained  to  exercise  their  in- 
telligence instead  of  relying  blindly  on  authority. 
In  these  respects  also  Locke's  writings  acted 
powerfully  on  the  public  opinions  of  the  next 
century,  especially  through  the  agency  of  French 
writers;  France,  as  Macaulay  justly  claims,  being 
the  interpreter  between  England  and  the  world. 
Our  present  business,  however,  is  not  with  the 
diffusion  but  the  development  of  thought,  and  to 
trace  this  we  must  return  to  British  philosophy. 


88  Modern  Philosophy 

Berkeley 

George  Berkeley  (1684-1753)  was  born  and 
educated  in  Ireland.  The  fact  is  of  no  racial 
or  national  importance,  but  interests  us  as 
accounting  for  his  having  received  a  better 
training  in  philosophy  than  at  that  time  was 
possible  in  England.  For  the  study  of  Locke, 
then  proscribed  at  Oxford,  had  already  been 
introduced  into  Dublin  when  Berkeley  was  an 
undergraduate  there;  and  it  was  as  a  critical 
advance  on  Locke  that  his  first  publication, 
the  New  Theory  of  Vision  (1709),  was  offered. 
Next  year  came  the  epoch-making  Principles^of 
Human  Knowledge,  followed  in  1713  by  the  more 
popular  Dialogues.  At  twenty-nine  his  work 
was  done,  and  although  he  lived  forty  years 
longer,  rising  to  be  a  Bishop  in  the  Irish  Church, 
after  projecting  a  Christian  Utopia  for  the  civi- 
lisation of  the  North  American  Indians  that 
never  came  to  anything,  and  practising  "every 
virtue  under  heaven/'  he  made  no  other  perma- 
nent contribution  to  thought. 

Berkeley  is  at  once  a  theorist  of  knowledge 
and  a  metaphysician,  combining,  in  a  way,  the 
method  ot  Locke  with  the  method  of  Descartes 
and  his  successors.  The  popular  notion  of  his 
philosophy  is  that  it  resolved  the  external  world 
into  a  dream,  or  at  least  into  something  that  has 
no  existence  outside  our  minds.  But  this  is  an 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  89 

utter  misconception,  against,  which  Berkeley 
constantly  protested.  His  quarrel  was  not  with 
common-sense,  but  with  the  theorists  of  per- 
ception. To  understand  this  we  must  return 
for  a  moment  to  Locke's  teaching.  It  will  be 
remembered  in  what  a  tangle  of  difficulties  the 
essay  had  left  its  author.  Matter  had  two  sets 
of  qualities,  primary  and  secondary,  the  one 
belonging  to  things  in  themselves,  the  other 
existing  only  in  our  minds;  yet  both  somehow 
combined  in  real  substances  independent  of  us, 
but  acting  on  our  senses.  Substance  as  such  is  an 
unknown  and  unknowable  postulate;  neverthe- 
less, we  know  that  it  was  created  by  God,  of 
whom  our  knowledge  is,  if  anything,  incon- 
veniently extensive.  Now  Berkeley,  to  find  his 
way  out  of  these  perplexities,  begins  by  attack- 
ing the  distinction  between  primary  and  second- 
ary qualities.  For  this  purpose  his  Theory  of 
Vision  was  written.  It  proves — or  attempts  to 
prove — that  extension  is  not  a  real  attribute  of 
things  in  themselves,  but  an  intellectual  con- 
struction, or  what  Locke  would  have  called  an 
''idea  of  reflection.'*  Till  then  people  had 
thought  that  its  objectivity  was  firmly  estab- 
lished by  the  concurrent  testimony  of  two  senses, 
sight  and  touch.  Berkeley  shows,  on  the  con- 
trary, that  visible  and  tangible  extension  are  not 
the  same  thing,  that  the  sensations — or,  as  he 
calls  them,  the  ideas — of  sight  and  touch  are  two 


go  Modern  Philosophy 

different  languages  whose  words  we  learn  by 
experience  to  interpret  in  terms  of  each  other 
without  their  being  necessarily  connected.  A 
man  born  blind  would  not  at  first  sight  know 
how  to  interpret  the  visual  signs  of  distance, 
direction,  and  magnitude;  he  would  have  to  learn 
them  by  experience.  These,  in  fact,  are  ideal 
relations  only  existing  in  the  mind;  and  so  we 
have  no  right  to  oppose  mind  as  inextended  to  an 
extended  or  an  external  world. 

Having  thus  cleared  the  ground,  our  young 
idealist  proceeds  in  his  next  and  greatest  work, 
Of  the  Principles  of  Human  Knowledge,  to  attack 
the  problem  from  another  side.  The  world  of 
objects  revealed  through  sensation  and  reflection 
is  clearly  no  illusion,  no  creation  of  our  own.  We 
find  it  there,  changing,  when  it  changes,  without 
or  even  very  much  against  our  will.  What,  then, 
is  its  origin  and  nature?  Locke's  view,  which  is 
the  common  view,  tells  us  that  it  consists  of  mate- 
rial bodies,  some  animated  and  some  not.  And 
matter,  the  supposed  substance  of  body,  is  made 
known  to  us  by  impressions  on  our  organs  of  sense. 
But  when  we  try  to  think  of  matter  apart  from 
these  sensible  qualities  and  the  relations  between 
them  it  vanishes  into  an  empty  abstraction. 
Now,  according  to  Berkeley  there  are  no  abstract 
i3eas — i.e.,  no  thoughts  unassociated  with  some 
mental  image  besides  a  mere  word  j^nd^Matter 
or  inanimate  substance  would  be  such  an  idea, 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  91 

therefore  it  does  got  exist .  There  is  nothing  but 
mind  and  its  contents — what  we  call  states  of 
consciousness,  what  Locke  and  Berkeley  called 
ideas.  Whence,  then,  come  the  objects  of  our 
consciousness,  and  whither  do  they  go  when 
we  cease  to  perceive  them?  At  this  point  the 
new  metaphysical  system  intervenes.  Berkeley 
says  that  all  things  subsist  in  the  consciousness 
of  God,  and  by  their  subsistence  his  existence  is 
proved.  The  direct  apprehension  of  a  reality 
that  is  not  ourselves,  becomes  possible  only 
through  what  would  be  called  in  modern  lan- 
guage a  subjective  participation  in  the  divine 
consciousness,  more  feebly  reflected,  as  would 
seem,  in  the  memories,  imaginations,  and  reason- 
ings of  our  finite  minds. 

In  pursuing  these  wonderful  speculations 
Berkeley  deviated  widely  from  the  direct  line  of 
English  philosophy,  and  it  is  difficult  not  to 
believe  that  the  deflection  was  determined  by 
the  influence  of  Malebranche,  especially  when 
we  find  that  the  writings  of  the  Oratorian  Father 
were  included  in  his  college  studies.  Moreover, 
a  parallel  line  of  idealistic  development  de- 
rived from  the  same  source  was  evolving  itself 
at  the  same  time  in  English  thought.  John 
Norris  (1657-1711),  a  correspondent  of  the 
Platonist  Henry  More,  an  opponent  of  Locke, 
and  a  disciple  of  Malebranche,  had  himself 
found  an  enthusiastic  admirer  in  Arthur  Collier 


92  Modern  Philosophy 

(1680-1732),  whose  Clams  Universalis  professed 
to  be  "a  demonstration  of  the  non-existence 
or  impossibility  of  an  external  world"  (1713). 
Both  Norris  and  Collier,  like  Malebranche  and 
Berkeley,  were  Churchmen;  but  so  strong  was 
the  drift  towards  idealism  that  Leibniz,  a  layman 
and  a  man  of  science,  contributed  by  his  Monado- 
logy  to  the  same  current.  Malebranche  neither 
was  nor  could  he  be  a  complete  idealist  in  the 
sense  of  denying  the  reality  of  matter;  for  the 
dogma  of  transubstantiation  bound  him,  as  a 
Catholic,  to  its  acceptance,  while  Berkeley, 
Collier,  and  Leibniz,  as  Protestants,  were  under 
no  such  obligation.  His  idealism  agreed  more 
nearly  with  the  Neo- Platonic  doctrine  of  Arche- 
types in  the  divine  Reason  among  which  Matter 
was  one.  On  the  other  hand,  Berkeley  probably 
borrowed  from  him  the  notion  of  a  direct  con- 
tact with  God,  the  difference  being  that  with  the 
Cartesian  it  is  conceived  as  an  objective  vision, 
with  Locke's  disciple  as  (if  the  expression  may 
be  permitted)  a  subjective  con-consciousnes. 
Leibniz,  again,  while  abolishing  Matter,  retains 
an  external  world  composed  indeed  of  spirits  and 
so  far  immaterial,  but  existing  independently  of 
God. 

All  these  systems  involve  the  negation  of  two 
fundamental  scientific  principles.  The  first  is 
that  every  change  must  be  explained  by  refer- 
ence to  an  antecedent  change  to  which  it  bears  a 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge          93 

strict  quantitative  relation.  The  second  is  that 
lio^parScular  change  can  be  referred  to  another 
change  as  its  necessary  antecedent  unless  it  can 
be  shown  by  experience  that  a  precisely  similar 
couple  of  changes  are,  in  fact,  always  so  connect- 
ed. Let  me  illustrate  these  principles  by  an  ex- 
ample. I  leave  a  kettle  full  of  cold  water  on  the 
fire,  and  on  returning  after  a  sufficient  interval  of 
time  I  find  the  water  boiling.  Had  I  stayed  by  the 
fire  and  watched  the  process,  my  kettle  would — 
a  popular  proverb  to  the  contrary  notwithstand- 
ing— have  certainly  boiled  as  soon,  but  also 
no  sooner  for  being  helped  by  my  conscious- 
ness. The  essential  thing  is  that  energy  of 
combustion  in  the  fire  should  be  turned  into 
energy  of  boiling  in  the  water.  Now,  what 
is  Berkeley's  interpretation  of  the  facts?  Fire, 
kettle,  water,  and  ebullition  are  what  in  his 
writings  are  called  "ideas" — i.  e.,  phenomena 
occasionally  in  my  mind,  but  always  in  God's 
mind.  And  according  to  this  view  the  necessary 
antecedent  to  the  boiling  of  the  water  is  not  the 
fire's  burning,  but  God's  consciousness  of  its 
burning,  his  perception  being  the  essence  of  the 
operation.  But  it  is  proved  by  experience  that 
neither  my  perception  nor  anyone  else's  ever 
made  a  single  drop  of  water  boil.  In  other 
words,  perception  is  not  in  this  instance  a  vera 
causa.  Why,  then,  should  the  perception  of  any 
other  mind,  however  exalted,  have  that  effect? 


94  Modern  Philosophy 

Nor  is  this  all.  How  does  Berkeley  know  that 
God  exists?  Because,  he  says,  to  exist  is  to  be 
perceived,  and  therefore  for  the  universe  to  exist 
implies  a  universal  Percipient.  But  he  got  the 
idea  of  God  from  other  men,  who  certainly  did 
not  come  by  it  as  a  generalisation  from  their 
perceptions;  they  got  it  by  generalising  from 
their  voluntary  actions,  which  do  produce  the 
changes  that  perception  cannot  produce.  It 
will  be  said  that  volitions  and  the  feelings  that 
prompt  them  exist  only  in  consciousness.  In 
whose  consciousness?  In  that  of  a  spirit.  And 
what  is  spirit  apart  from  sensation,  thought,  feel- 
ing, and  volition?  Simply  one  of  those  abstract 
ideas  whose  existence  Berkeley  himself  denied. 

Hume 

The  next  step  in  the  evolution  of  English 
thought  was  to  consist  in  a  return  to  Locke's 
method,  involving  a  complete  breach  with 
seventeenth-century  Platonism,  and  with  the 
Continental  metaphysics  that  it  had  inspired. 
This  decisive  movement  was  effected  by  one  in 
whom  German  criticism  has  recognised  the  great- 
est of  all  British  philosophers.  David  Hume 
(1711-1776)  was  born  and  bred  at  Edinburgh, 
which  also  seems  to  have  been  through  life  his 
favourite  residence.  But  his  great  work,  the 
Treatise  on  Human  Nature,  was  written  during  a 


DAVID  HUME 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  95 

stay  in  France,  between  the  ages  of  twenty-three 
and  twenty-six.  Thus  his  precocity  was  even 
greater  than  Berkeley's.  Indeed,  such  maturity 
of  thought  so  early  reached  is  without  a  parallel 
in  history.  But  Hume's  style  had  not  then  ac- 
quired the  perfection — the  inimitable  charm, 
Kant  calls  it — of  his  later  writings ;  and,  whether 
for  this  or  for  other  reasons,  the  book,  in  his  own 
words,  "fell  dead-born  from  the  press."  In 
middle  life  the  office  of  librarian  of  the  Advo- 
cates' Library  at  Edinburgh  gave  him  access 
to  the  materials  for  his  History  of  England,  which 
proved  a  source  of  fame  and  profit.  A  profound 
historical  scholar,  J.  S.  Brewer,  tells  us  that  Hume 
"  possessed  in  a  pre-eminent  degree  some  of  the 
highest  excellences  of  a  historian/'  Other 
historians  have  treated  their  subjects  philo- 
sophically; he  furnishes  the  sole  instance  of  a 
great  speculative  genius  who  has  also  produced  a 
historical  masterpiece  of  the  first  order.  But 
morally  it  is  a  blot  on  his  fame.  It  is  sad  that  a 
philosopher  should  have  deliberately  perverted 
the  truth,  that  one  who  has  performed  price- 
less services  to  freedom  of  thought  should  have 
made  himself  the  apologist  of  clericalising  abso- 
lutism, and,  still  more,  that  a  master  of  English 
played  this  part  to  some  extent  through  hatred  of 
the  English  people  engendered  by  disappointed 
literary  ambition.  It  may  be  mentioned,  how- 
ever, as  a  possible  extenuation,  that  towards  the 


96  Modern  Philosophy 

middle  of  the  eighteenth  century  the  highest 
English  ability  had  thrown  itself,  with  few 
exceptions,  on  the  Tory  side.  It  must  be 
mentioned  also  that  in  private  life  Hume's 
character  was  entirely  admirable — cheerful, 
generous,  and  gentle,  without  a  frailty  and 
without  a  stain.  His  opinions  were  unpopu- 
lar; but  his  life  offered  no  handle  for  obloquy, 
although  his  studious  retirement  was  more  than 
once  exchanged  for  the  responsibilities  of  politi- 
cal office,  and  the  freedom  from  pedantry  so 
conspicuous  in  his  writings  bears  witness  'to 
habits  of  well-bred  social  intercourse. 

Hume's  philosophy  is  best  understood  when  we 
consider  it  as,  in  the  first  place,  a  criticism  of 
Berkeley,  just  as  Berkeley's  had  been  a  criticism 
of  Locke.  It  will  be  remembered  that  the 
founder  of  subjective  idealism  discarded  the 
notion  of  material  substance  as  an  "abstract 
idea,"  an  unintelligible  figment  devoid  of  any 
sensuous  or  imaginative  content.  The  only 
true  substances  are  the  subjects  of  what  we 
call  experience  communicating  through  sensation 
with  God,  the  infinite  spirit  whose  eternal  con- 
sciousness is  reality  itself.  Hume  applied  the 
same  tests  to  spiritual  substance,  and  found 
that  it  equally  disappeared  under  his  intro- 
spective analysis.  He  begins  by  dividing  the 
contents  of  consciousness  into  two  classes,  im- 
pressions and  ideas — the  second  being  copies 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  97 

of  the  first,  and  distinguished  from  them  by 
their  relative  faintness.  Now,  from  these 
perceptions  (which  he  called  thoughts)  Des- 
cartes had  passed  by  an  immediate  inference 
to  the  ego  or  self,  which  he  affirms  as  the  pri- 
mary fact  of  consciousness,  using  it  as  a  basis 
for  sundry  other  conclusions.  But  Hume  stops\  | 
him  at  once,  and  will  not  grant  the  exist-  Ujft*' 
ence  of  the  metaphysical  self — that  is,  a  simple  J  » 
and  continued  substance,  as  distinguished  from 
particular  states  of  consciousness.  We  a,re,  he 
declares,  "nothing  but  a  bundle  of  different 
perceptions,  which  succeed  each  other  with  an 
inconceivable  rapidity,  and  are  in  a  perpetual 
flux  and  movement/'  "There  is  properly  no 
simplicity  in  it  [the  self ]  at  one  time,  nor  identity 
in  different  [times] ;  whatever  natural  propensity 
we  may  have  to  imagine  that  simplicity  and 
identity/'  So  much  being  assumed,  Berkeley's 
whole  argument  for  a  new  theology  founded  on 
subjective  idealism  is  bound  to  collapse,  as  also 
is  the  argument  for  natural  immortality  derived 
from  the  supposed  simplicity  and  identity  of  the 
thinking  substance. 

Modern  critics  have  rightly  insisted,  as  against  "\ 
Hume,  that  isolated  perceptions  without  a  self    U 
are  abstractions  not  less  unintelligible  than  a     U^- 
self  without  perceptions.     But  the  metaphysical     I  f 
argument    for    human    immortality    has    not 
benefited  by  this  more  concrete  interpretation  of 


98  Modern  Philosophy 

epistemology ;  and  probably  Hume  was  really 
more  interested  in  destroying  this  than  in  main- 
taining the  sceptical  paradox  which  does  not 
recur  in  his  later  writings. 

A  word  must  be  added  about  Hume's  division 
of  perceptions  into  impressions  and  ideas.  The 
point  left  out  of  sight  in  this  analysis  is  that 
impressions  of  sense  habitually  find  their  reflexes 
not  in  revived  sensations,  but  in  expressions,  in 
motor  reactions  which,  with  human  beings, 
mostly  take  the  form  of  words  uttered  or  thought . 
These,  no  doubt,  are  associated  to  some  small 
extent  with  revived  sensations;  but  they  are 
more  commonly  grouped  with  other  words,  with 
movements  of  the  limbs,  and  with  actions  on 
the  material  or  human  environment  of  the  per- 
cipient. Such  expressions  are  incomparably 
easier  to  revive  in  memory,  imagination,  or 
expectation  than  the  impressions  that  originally 
excited  them;  and,  indeed,  it  is  in  connection 
with  them  that  such  revivals  of  sensation  as  we 
actually  experience  take  place.  And  it  is  prob- 
able that  to  this  active  side  of  our  consciousness 
that  we  may  trace  those  associative  processes 
which  Hume  studies  next  in  his  analysis  of 
human  knowledge. 

Putting  aside  principles  of  doubtful  or  se- 
condary value,  the  relations  between  states  of 
consciousness  that  first  offer  themselves  to 
view  are,  according  to  Hume,  Co-existence  and 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge  99 

Succession  (united  under  the  name  of  Con- 
tiguity), Resemblance,  and  Causation.  It  is 
with  the  account  he  gives  of  this  last  category 
that  his  name  is  inseparably  associated,  for  from 
it  all  subsequent  speculation  has  taken  rise. 
Yet  primarily  he  seems  to  have  had  no  other 
object  in  view  than  to  simplify  the  laws  of  know- 
ledge by  resolving  one  of  them  into  a  particular 
case  of  another,  and  thus  reducing  his  three 
categories  to  two.  The  relation  of  cause  and 
effect,  he  tells  us,  is  no  more  than  a  certain 
relation  between  antecedent  and  consequent  in 
time  where  the  sequence  is  so  habitual  as  to 
establish  in  our  minds  a  custom  of  expecting  the 
one  whenever  the  other  occurs.  The  sequence 
is  not  necessary,  for  one  can  think,  without  any 
self-contradiction,  of  a  change  which  has  not 
been  preceded  by  another  change;  nor  is  it,  like 
the  truths  of  geometry,  something  that  can  be 
known  a  priori.  Without  experience  no  one 
could  tell  that  bread  will  nourish  a  man  and 
not  nourish  a  lion,  nor  even  predict  how  a  bil- 
liard-ball will  behave  when  another  ball  strikes 
it.  Should  it  be  objected  that  the  a  priori  know- 
ledge of  a  general  principle  need  not  involve  an 
equal  knowledge  of  nature's  operations  in  par- 
ticular cases,  Hume  would  doubtless  reply  by 
saying  that  there  is  no  abstract  idea  of  causation 
apart  from  its  concrete  exemplifications. 

It  is  possible  to  accept   Hume's  theory  in 


ioo  Modern  Philosophy 

principle  without  pledging  oneself  to  all  his 
incidental  contentions.  Causation,  as  a  general 
law,  may  be  known  only  by  experience,  whether 
we  can  or  cannot  think  of  it  as  a  pure  abstrac- 
tion. And  we  may  interpret  it  in  terms  of  un- 
conditional antecedence  and  consequence,  while 
discarding  his  apparent  assumption  of  an  inscru- 
table connection  between  the  two;  a  mysterious 
necessity  for  the  production  of  the  one  by  the 
other,  for  which  it  is  felt  that  a  reason  exists, 
but  for  which  our  reason  cannot  account.  It 
is  inconceivable  that  our  knowledge  of  any 
given  sequence  could  be  increased,  except 
by  the  disclosure  of  intermediate  sequences, 
making  their  continuity,  in  space  and  time, 
more  absolute  than  we  had  before  perceived, 
until  the  whole  process  has  been  resolved  into 
a  transference  of  momentum  from  one  mole- 
cule to  another — a  change  for  which,  according 
to  Hume,  no  reason  can  be  given.  Nor,  on 
his  principles,  would  it  help  us  to  explain 
such  transferences  by  bringing  them  under  the 
law  of  the  Conservation  of  Energy.  For, 
although  this  would  be  a  great  triumph  for 
science,  his  philosophy  demands  a  reason  why 
the  quantity  of  energy  should  remain  unalter- 
able for  ever. 

It  is  a  mistake,  shared  by  Hume  with  his 
opponents,  to  suppose  that  the  common-sense 
of  mankind  ever  saw  more  than  invariable  se- 


The  Theorists  cf  Rao'wlec&e         tm» 

quence  in  the  relation  of  cause  and  effect,  or 
ever  interpolated  a  mysterious  power  between 
them.  In  the  famous  verse,  "Let  there  be 
light,  and  there  was  light/'  it  is  the  instanta- 
neity  of  succession,  not  the  interpolation  of  any 
exerted  effort,  that  so  impresses  the  imagination. 
And  when  Shakespeare  wants  to  illustrate  logical 
compulsion  in  conduct,  his  reference  is  to  an 
instance  of  invariable  succession : 

This  above  all :  to  thine  own  self  be  true, 
And  it  must  follow,  as  the  night  the  day, 
Thou  canst  not  then  be  false  to  any  man. 

Indeed,  I  think  it  will  be  found  on  examination 
that  when  we  associate  the  idea  of  power,  or  of 
necessity,  with  causal  sequences,  it  is  not  in 
connection  with  a  case  of  causation  here  and  now 
but  rather  in  reference  to  similar  effects  that 
may  be  expected  from  the  same  cause  elsewhere 
or  at  another  time.  And  that  " custom''  by 
which  Hume  seeks  to  explain  our  belief  in  the 
"  power"  of  the  cause  to  produce  its  effect  as 
well  as  the  "  necessity"  of  the  connection  be- 
tween them,  rather  acts  negatively  by  elimi- 
nating all  other  antecedents  as  possible  causes 
than  positively  by  setting  up  a  habit  of  think- 
ing about  a  particular  antecedent  and  con- 
sequent at  the  same  time.  And  that  is  why  a 
burnt  child  needs  no  repetition  of  the  experiment 


IO2  ModerrVi  Philosophy 

to  be  convinced  that  contact  with  fire  was  the 
cause  of  its  pain.  The  very  novelty  of  the  ex- 
periment was  enough  to  eliminate  any  explana- 
tion other  than  that  of  contact  with  the  flame. 

The  child,  as  it  grows  older,  may  learn  to 
speak  of  the  fire  as  having  a  power  to  burn. 
But  that  merely  means,  "if  I  touch  it,  it  will 
burn  me — or  light  paper  if  I  hold  the  paper  to 
it."  Power,  in  fact,  is  incomplete  causation,  the 
presence  of  every  condition  but  that  one  which, 
in  Aristotelian  phrase,  turns  potency  into  act. 
And  it  is  in  contradistinction  to  that  idea  of 
possibility  that  the  idea  of  necessary  connection 
comes  in.  When  all  the  elements  of  the  causal 
antecedent  are  combined  the  effect  necessarily 
supervenes.  Furthermore,  the  causal  antece- 
dent is  thought  of  as  necessary  in  contrast  with 
the  contingency  of  other  antecedents  whose  con- 
nection with  the  effect  is  merely  accidental. 
Finally,  the  idea  of  production  has  been  quoted 
as  vitally  distinguishing  true  causation  from  in- 
variable sequence.  But  various  myths,  of  which 
the  story  of  CEdipus  is  the  best  known,  show 
that  primitive  folk  regard  day  and  night  as 
alternately  producing  one  another,  just  as  Polo- 
nius  quotes  their  sequence  as  a  type  of  logical 
necessity. 

Hume  professed  himself  a  Deist,  but  probably 
with  no  more  seriousness  than  when  he,  or  when 
Gibbon,  called  Christianity  "our  religion."  At 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         103 

any  rate,  his  philosophy  destroys  every  argu- 
ment for  the  existence  of  a  Creator  advanced  in 
his  own  or  in  the  preceding  century.  Nor  need 
his  particular  theory  of  causation  be  invoked  for 
the  purpose.  The  most  telling  attack  is  on  the 
argument  from  design.  The  apparent  adapta- 
tion of  means  to  ends  in  living  organisms  is 
quoted  as  evidence  of  their  having  been  planned 
by  a  conscious  intelligence.  But,  answers  Hume, 
such  an  intelligence  would  itself  exhibit  marks 
of  design,  and  so  on  for  ever.  Why  not,  then, 
stop  at  the  animal  organism  as  an  ultimate  fact? 
It  was  Shelley's  unlucky  demand  for  a  solution 
of  this  difficulty  that  led  to  his  expulsion  from 
Oxford. 

It  has  been  shown  how  the  new  analysis  of 
mind  cut  the  ground  from  under  Berkeley's 
theism,  and  from  under  the  metaphysical  argu- 
ment for  human  immortality.  By  denying  the 
substantiality  of  the  ego  it  also  confirmed  the 
necessitarianism  of  Spinoza.  Hume  seemed  to 
think  he  could  abate  the  unpopularity  of  this 
doctrine  by  interpreting  the  constant  motivation 
of  human  actions  as  a  mere  relation  of  ante- 
cedence and  consequence.  But  the  decisive 
point  was  that  he  assimilated  sequences  in 
conscious  behaviour  to  the  unconscious  sequences 
in  physical  events.  Thus,  for  the  vulgar  and 
the  theologians,  he  remained  what  would  now 
be  called  a  materialist. 


IO4  Modern:  Philosophy 

Kant 

The  English  philosophy  of  experience  and  the 
Continental  philosophy  of  a  priori  spiritualism, 
after  their  brief  convergence  in  the  metaphysics 
of  Berkeley,  parted  company  once  more,  the 
empirical  tradition  being  henceforth  represented, 
not  only  by  Hume,  but  in  a  more  or  less  anti- 
Christian  and  much  more  superficial  form  by 
Voltaire,  Rousseau,  and  the  French  Encyclo- 
paedists; while  the  Leibnizian  philosophy  was 
systematised  and  taught  in  German,  by  Wolf, 
and  a  dull  but  useful  sort  of  modernised  Aristo- 
telianism  was  set  up  under  the  name  of  "common 
.sense"  by  Thomas  Reid  (1710-1796)  and  his 
school  in  the  Scottish  Universities. 

The  extraordinary  genius  who  was  to  re- 
combine  the  parted  currents  in  a  speculative 
movement  of  unexampled  volume,  velocity,  and 
depth  showed  nothing  of  the  precocity  that  had 
distinguished  Berkeley  and  Hume.  Immanuel 
Kant  (1724-1 804),  the  son  of  a  saddler  of  Scottish 
extraction,  was  born  at  Konigsberg  in  Prussia, 
where  he  spent  his  whole  life,  holding  a  chair  at 
the  University  from  1770  to  1797.  It  is  related 
that  on  the  day  of  his  death  a  small  bright  cloud 
was  seen  sailing  alone  across  the  clear  blue  sky, 
of  such  a  remarkable  appearance  that  a  crowd 
assembled  on  the  bridge  to  watch  it.  One  of 
them,  a  common  soldier,  exclaimed,  "That  is 


IMMANUEL  KANT 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         105 

Kant's  soul  going  to  heaven!" — a  touching  and  a 
beautiful  tribute  to  the  illustrious  German,  whose 
lofty,  pure,  and  luminous  spirit  it  was  uniquely 
fitted  to  characterise. 

Kant  grew  up  among  the  Pietists,  a  school 
which  played  much  the  same  part  in  Germany 
that  the  Methodists  and  the  Evangelicals 
played  in  England;  indeed,  it  was  from  them 
that  John  Wesley  received  his  final  inspiration. 
The  Konigsberg  student  came,  in  time,  to  discard 
their  theology  while  retaining  the  stern  Puritan 
morality  with  which  it  was  wedded,  and  even, 
Rationalist  as  he  became,  some  of  their  mystical 
religiosity.  What  drew  him  away  to  philosophy 
seems  to  have  been  first  the  study  of  classical 
philology  and  then  physical  science,  especially  as 
presented  to  him  in  Newton's  works.  And  so  the 
young  man's  first  ambition,  after  settling  down 
as  a  University  teacher  at  Konigsberg,  was  to 
extend  the  Newtonian  method  still  further  by 
explaining,  on  mechanical  principles,  the  origin 
and  constitution  of  that  celestial  system  whose 
movements  Newton  had  reduced  to  law,  but 
whose  beginning  he  had  left  unaccounted  for 
except  by — what  was  not  science — the  direct 
fiat  of  omnipotence. 

Kant  offered  a  brilliant  solution  of  the  pro- 
blem in  his  Natural  History  of  the  Heavens 
(J755)>  a  work  embodying  the  celebrated  nebu- 
lar hypothesis  rediscovered  forty  years  later 


106  Modern  Philosophy 

by  Laplace.  It  has  been  well  observed  that 
great  philosophers  are  mostly,  if  not  always, 
what  at  Oxford  and  Cambridge  would  be  called 
"double-firsts" — that  is,  apart  from  their  philo- 
sophy, they  have  done  first-class  work  in  some 
special  line  of  investigation,  as  Descartes  by 
creating  analytical  geometry,  Spinoza  by  apply- 
ing Biblical  criticisms  to  theology,  Leibniz  by 
discovering  the  differential  calculus,  Locke  by  his 
theory  of  constitutional  government,  Berkeley 
by  his  theory  of  vision,  Hume  by  his  contribution 
to  history  and  political  economy.  Kant's  cos- 
mogony may  have  been  premature  and  mistaken 
in  its  details ;  but  his  idea  of  the  heavenly  bodies 
as  having  originated  from  the  condensation  of 
diffused  gaseous  matter  still  holds  its  ground; 
and  although  the  more  general  idea  of  natural 
evolution  as  opposed  to  supernatural  creation 
is  not  modern  but  Greek,  to  have  revived  and 
reapplied  it  on  so  great  a  scale  is  a  service  of 
extraordinary  merit. 

The  next  great  event  in  Kant's  intellectual 
career  is  his  rejection  of  Continental  apriorism  in 
metaphysics  for  the  empiricism  of  the  English 
school,  especially  as  regards  the  idea  of  causa- 
tion. For  a  few  years  (1762-1765)  Kant  accepts 
Hume's  theory  that  there  is  nothing  in  any  suc- 
cession of  events  or  in  change  generally  to  prove 
on  grounds  of  pure  reason  that  there  must  be 
more  in  it  than  a  customary  sequence.  To  be- 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         107 

lieve  that  anything  may  happen  without  a  cause 
does  not  involve  a  logical  contradiction;  and  at 
that  time  he  believed  nothing  to  be  known  a 
priori  except  that  the  denial  of  which  involves 
such  a  contradiction.  But\on  reconsidering  the 
basis  of  mathematical  truth!  it  seemed  to  him  to 
be  something  other  than  the  logical  laws  of  Iden- 
tity and  Contradiction.  When  we  say  that  seven 
and  five  are  twelve  we  put  something  into  the 
predicate  that  was  not  affirmed  in  the  subject, 
and  also  when  we  say  that  a  straight  line  is  the 
shortest  distance  between  two  points.  Yet  the 
second  proposition  is  as  certain  as  the  first,  and 
both  are  certain  in  the  highest  degree,  more  cer- 
tain than  anything  learned  from  experience,  and 
needing  no  experience  to  confirm  them. 

So  much  being  admitted,  we  have  to  recog- 
nise a  fundamental  division  of  judgments  into 
two  classes,  analytic  and  synthetic.  Judgments 
in  which  the  predicate  adds  nothing  to  the  sub- 
ject are  analytic.  When  we  affirm  all  matter 
to  be  extended,  that  is  an  instance  of  the  for- 
mer, for  here  we  are  only  making  more  explicit 
what  was  already  contained  in  the  notion  of 
matter.  On  the  other  hand,  when  we  affirm 
that  all  matter  is  heavy,  that  is  an  instance  of 
the  latter  or  synthetic  class,  for  we  can  think  of 
matter  without  thinking  that  it  has  weight. 
Furthermore,  this  is  not  only  a  synthetic  judg- 
ment, but  it  is  a  synthetic  judgment  a  posteriori; 


io8  Modern  Philosophy 

for  the  law  of  universal  gravitation  is  known  only 
by  experience.  Bat  there  are  also  synthetic  judg- 
ments a  priori;  for,  as  we  have  just  seen,  the  fun- 
damental truths  of  arithmetic  and  geometry 
belong  to  this  class,  as  do  also  by  consequence  all 
the  propositions  logically  deduced  from  these — 
that  is  to  say,  the  whole  of  mathematical  science.  - 
Up  to  this  point  Kant  would  have  carried  the 
whole  Cartesian  school,  and,  more  generally,  all 
the  modern  Platonists,  along  with  him ;  while  he 
would  have  given  the  English  empiricists  and 
their  French  disciples  a  rather  hard  nut  to  crack. 
For  they  would  have  had  to  choose  between 
admitting  that  mathematics  was  a  mass  of 
identical  propositions  or  explaining,  in  the  face 
of  Hume's  criticism,  what  claims  to  absolute 
certainty  its  truths,  any  more  than  the  Law  of 
Causation,  possess.  Now,  the  great  philo- 
sophical genius  of  Kant  is  shown  by  nothing 
more  than  by  this,  that  he  did  not  stop  here. 
Recognising  to  the  same  extent  as  Locke  and 
Hume  that  all  knowledge  comes  from  experience 
— at  any  rate,  in  the  sense  of  not  coming  by  su- 
pernatural communication,  as  Malebranche  and 
Berkeley  thought — he  puts  the  famous  question, 
How  are  synthetic  judgments  a  priori  possible? 
Or,  as  it  might  be  paradoxically  expressed,  How 
come  we  to  know  with  the  most  certainty  the 
things  that  we  have  not  been  taught  by  experi- 
ence? The  answer  is,  that  we  know  them  by  the 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         109 

most_miiaaate  experience  of  all — the  underlying 
consciousness  that  we  have  made  them  what  they 
are.  Our  minds  are  no  mere  passive  recipients, 
in  which  a  mass  of  sensations,  poured  in  from 
some  external  source,  are  then  arranged  after  an 
order  equally  originated  from  without ;  there  is  a 
principle  of  spontaneity  in  our  own  subjectivity 
by  which  the  objective  order  of  nature  is  created. 
What  Kant  calls  the  Matter  of  knowledge  is 
given  from  without,  the  Form  from  within.  And 
this  process  begins  with  the  imposition  of  the 
two  great  fundamental  Forms,  Space  and  Time, 
on  the  raw  material  of  sensation  by  our  minds. 

By  space  and  time  Kant  does  not  mean  the 
abstract  ideas  of  coexistence  and  succession ;  nor 
does  he  call  them,  as  some  critics  used  incor- 
rectly to  suppose,  forms  of  thought,  but  forms 
of  intuition.  We  do  not  build  them  up  with 
the  help  of  muscular  or  other  feelings,  but  are 
conscious  of  them  in  a  way  not  admitting  of  any 
further  analysis.  The  parts  of  space,  no  doubt, 
are  coexistent,  but  they  are  also  connected  and 
continuous;  more  than  this,  positions  in  space 
do  not  admit  of  mutual  substitution;  the  right 
hand  and  left  hand  glove  are  perfectly  sym- 
metrical, but  the  one  cannot  be  superimposed  on 
the  other.  Besides,  all  particular  spaces  are  con- 
tained in  universal  space,  not  as  particular  con- 
ceptions are  contained  in  a  general  conception, 
but  as  parts  of  that  which  extends  to  infinity,  and 


no  Modern  Philosophy 

where  each  has  an  individual  place  of  its  own, 
repeating  all  the  characters  of  space  in  general 
except  its  illimitable  extension.  And  the  same 
is  true  of  time,  with  this  further  distinction  from 
abstract  succession,  that  succession  may  be  re- 
versed; whereas  the  order  of  past,  present,  and 
future  is  irreversibly  maintained. 

The  contemporary  school  of  Reid  in  Scotland, 
and  the  subsequent  Eclectic  school  of  Victor 
Cousin  in  France,  would  agree  with  Kant  in 
maintaining  that  sensuous  experience  will  not 
account  for  our  knowledge  of  space  and  time. 
But  they  would  protest,  in  the  name  of  common - 
sense,  against  the  reduction  of  these  apparently 
fundamental  elements  to  purely  subjective  forms. 
They  would  ask,  with  the  German  critic  Tren- 
delenburg,  Why  cannot  space  and  time  be  known 
intuitively  and  yet  really  exist?  Kant  furnishes 
no  direct  answer  to  the  question,  but  he  has 
suggested  one  in  another  connection.  Mathema - 
tical  truth  is  concerned  with  spatial  and  tem- 
poral relations,  and  for  that  truth  to  be  above 
suspicion  and  exception  we  must  assume  that 
the  objects  with  which  it  deals  are  wholly  within 
our  grasp — that  our  knowledge  of  them  is  ex- 
haustive. But  there  could  be  no  such  assur- 
ance on  the  supposition  that,  besides  the  space 
and  time  of  our  sensuous  experience,  another 
space  and  time  existed  independently  of  our 
consciousness  as  attributes  of  things  in  them- 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         in 

selves — possibly  differing  in  important  respects 
from  ours — as,  for  example,  a  finite,  or  a  non- 
continuous,  or  a  four-dimensional  space,  and  a 
time  with  a  circular  instead  of  a  progressive 
movement. 

This  easy  assumption  that  reality  accommo- 
dates itself  to  our  intellectual  convenience,  in- 
;'  stead  of  our  being  obliged  to  accommodate  our- 
theories  of  knowledge  to  reality,  runs  through 
and  vitiates  the  whole  of  Kant's  philosophy. 
But,  taking  the  narrower  ground  of  logical 
consistency,  one  hardly  sees  how  his  principles 
can  hold  together.  We  are  told  that  the  sub- 
jectivity of  space  and  time  is  not  presented  as  a 
plausible  hypothesis,  but  as  a  certain  and  in- 
dubitable truth,  for  in  no  other  way  can  mathe- 
matical certainty  be  explained.  The  claim  is 
questionable,  but  let  it  be  granted.  Immedi- 
ately a  fresh  difficulty  starts  up.  What  is  the 
source  of  our  certainty  that  space  and  time  are 
subjective  forms  of  intuition?  If  the  answer 
is,  because  that  assumption  guarantees  the 
certainty  of  mathematics,  then  Kant  is  reason- 
ing in  a  circle.  If  he  appeals — as  in  consistency 
he  ought — to  another  order  of  subjectivity  as 
the  sanction  of  his  first  transcendental  argument, 
such  reasoning  involves  the  regress  to  infinity. 

Again,  on  Kant's  theory,  time  is  the  form  of 
intuition  for  the  inner  sense.  So  when  we  be- 
come conscious  of  mental  events  we  know  them 


H2  Modern  Philosophy 

only  as  phenomena ;  we  remain  ignorant  of  what 
mind  is  in  itself.  But  before  the  publication  in 
1770  of  Kant's  inaugural  dissertation  on  The 
Sensible  and  the  Intelligible  World  every  one, 
plain  men  and  philosophers  alike,  believed  that 
the  consciousness  of  our  successive  thoughts  and 
feelings  was  the  very  type  of  reality  itself;  and 
they  held  this  belief  with  a  higher  degree  of 
assurance  than  that  given  to  the  axioms  of 
geometry.  .  By  what  right,  then,  are  we  asked 
to  give  up  the  greater  for  the  less,  to  surrender 
our  self-assurance  as  a  ransom  for  Euclid's 
Elements  or  even  for  Newton's  Principia? 

Once  more,  surely  mathematics  is  concerned 
not  with  space  and  time  as  such,  but  with  their 
artificial  delimitations  as  points,  lines,  figures, 
numbers,  moments,  etc.  And  it  may  be  granted 
that  these  are  purely  subjective  in  the  sense  of 
being  imposed  by  our  imagination  (with  the  aid 
of  sensible  signs)  on  the  external  world.  What 
if  this  subjectivity  were  the  true  source  of  that 
peculiar  certainty  belonging  to  synthetic  judg- 
ments a  priori?  True,  Kant  counts  in  our  judg- 
ments about  the  infinity  and  eternity  of  space 
and  time  with  other  accepted  characteristics  of 
theirs  as  intuitive  certainties.  But  there  are 
thinkers  who  find  the  negation  of  such  properties 
not  inconceivable,  so  that  they  cannot  be  ad- 
duced as  evidence  of  a  priority,  still  less  of 
subjectivity. 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         113 

Eleven  years  after  the  inaugural  dissertation 
Kant  published  his  most  important  contribution 
to  philosophy,  The  Critique  of  Pure  Reason 
(1781).  Pure  Reason  means  the  faculty  by^j 
which  ideas  are  obtained  independently  of  all 
experience,  and  the  critic's  object  is  to  ascertain 
how  far  such  ideas  are  valid.  As  a  preliminary 
to  that  inquiry  the  question  is  also  mooted,  How 
is  experience  possible?  It  is  answered  by  a 
critique  of  the  understanding  or  faculty  of  con- 
ception; and  as  conception  implies  perception, 
this  again  is  prefaced  by  a  section  in  which 
Kant's  theory  of  space  and  time  is  repeated  and 
reinforced. 

It  will  be  remembered  that  what  started  the 
whole  of  the  new  criticism  was  Hume's  scep- 
tical analysis  of  Causation;  and  the  central  in- 
terest of  The  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  lies  in  the 
effort  to  reconstitute  the  causal  law  in  the  light 
of  the  new  theory  of  knowledge ;  but  so  enormous 
is  the  mass  of  technicalities  piled  up  for  this 
purpose  as  largely  to  conceal  it  from  view,  and, 
on  its  disclosure,  to  give  the  idea  of  a  gigantic 
machine  set  in  motion  to  crack  a  nut.  And  the 
nut  after  all  is  not  cracked ;  the  shell  slips  from 
between  the  grappling  surfaces  long  before  they 
meet. 

We  have  seen  how  Kant  interpreted  every  ) 
judgment  as  a  synthesis  of  subject  and  predi-  f 
cate.  Now,  whether  the  synthesis  be  a  priori 


H4  Modern  Philosophy 

or  a  posteriori,  a  study  of  the  forms  of  judgment 
as  enumerated  in  the  common  logic  shows  that 
there  are  four,  and  only  four,  ways  in  which 
it  can  be  effected.  All  judgments  fall  under  the 
following  classes:  Quantity,  Quality,  Relation, 
and  Modality — terms  whose  meaning  will  be 
presently  explained.  And  each  of  these  again 
is  tripartite.  We  may  say  (i.)  that  one  AisB, 
or  that  some  A's  are  B,  or  that  all  A's  are  B ;  (ii.) 
that  A  is  B,  that  A  is  not  B,  that  not  all  A's  are  B ; 
(iii.)  that  A  is  B,  that  A  is  B  if  C  is  D,  that  A  is 
either  B,  C,  or  D;  or  (iv.)  that  A  may  be  B,  that 
A  is  B,  or  that  A  must  be  B.  The  reason  why 
there  are  four  and  only  four  classes  is  that  judg- 
ment has  to  do  with  the  subject  in  refer- 
ence to  the  predicate,  which  gives  Quanity; 
with  the  predicate  in  reference  to  the  sub- 
ject, which  gives  Quality;  with  the  connec- 
tion between  the  two,  which  gives  Relation; 
and  with  the  synthesis  between  them  in  re- 
ference to  our  knowledge  of  it,  which  gives 
Modality. 

Now,  according  to  Kant,  that  there  should  be 
so  many  kinds  of  judgment  and  no  more  implies 
that  our  understanding  contributes  a  formal  ele- 
ment to  the  constitution  of  all  knowledge,  consist- 
ing of  four  combining  principles,  without  which 
experience  would  be  impossible.  He  calls  these 
Categories,  and  they  are  enumerated  in  the 
following  table: 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         115 

(i.)    Quantity. 
Unity,    Plurality,    Totality. 

(ii.)  Quality. 
Reality,  Negation,  Limitation. 

(iii.)  Relation. 

Substance   and    Accident;    Cause   and    Effect; 
Action  and  Reaction  (Reciprocity). 

(iv.)  Modality. 

Possibility    and    Impossibility;    Existence    and 
Non-Existence;  Necessity  and  Contingency. 

A  study  of  the  Categories  suggests  some 
rather  obvious  criticisms  on  the  Critical  Philo- 
sophy itself,  (i.)  The  first  two  terms  in  each 
triad  evidently  form  an  antithetical  couple,  of 
which  the  third  term  is  the  synthesis.  Here  we 
have  the  first  germ  of  a  disease  by  which  the 
systems  of  Kant's  successors  were  much  more 
seriously  infected.  In  the  table  it  is  shown  by 
the  intrusion  of  Limitation,  a  wholly  super- 
fluous adjunct  to  Reality  and  Negation;  in  the 
conversion  of  Reciprocity  into  a  wholly  fictitious 
synthesis  of  Substantiality  with  Causation;  and 
in  the  complete  absurdity  of  making  Necessity 
a  combination  of  Possibility  with  Existence, 
(ii.)  Innate  ideas,  after  they  had  been  exploded 
by  Locke,  are  reintroduced  into  philosophy  by 
a  sufficiently  transparent  piece  of  legerdemain. 
For  assuming  that  the  human  intelligence  pos- 
sesses a  power  of  organising  and  drilling  the 


n6  Modern  Philosophy 

sensuous  appearances  which  without  its  control 
would  appear  only  as  a  disorderly  mob,  it  by  no 
means  follows  that  they  must  thereby  be  referred 
to  an  extraphenomenal  principle.  But  such  a 
principle  is  plainly  implied  by  the  category  of 
Substance.  Used  in  a  scholastic  sense,  it  does 
not  mean  the  sensuous  attributes  of  a  thing 
taken  altogether,  but  something  that  underlies 
and  supports  them.  And  Kant  himself  seems 
to  take  his  category  in  that  significance.  For 
he  claims  to  deduce  from  it  the  law  of  the  inde- 
structibility of  matter;  as  if  I  could  not  say 
snow  is  white  without  committing  myself  to  the 
assertion  that  the  ultimate  particles  of  snow  have 
existed  and  will  exist  for  ever,  (iii.)  The  sub- 
stitution of  Causation  for  logical  sequence,  as 
implicated  in  the  hypothetical  judgment  of 
Relation,  is  perfectly  scandalous;  and  still  more 
scandalous  is  substitution  of  Reciprocity  or 
Action  and  Reaction  for  Disjunction.  The  last 
points  require  to  be  examined  a  little  more  in 
detail. 

The  sequence  of  an  effect  to  its  cause  has  only 
a  verbal  resemblance  to  the  sequence  of  a  logical 
consequent  to  its  reason.  We  declare  cate- 
gorically that  every  change  has  a  cause  which 
precedes  it.  Logical  sequence  is,  on  the  other 
hand,  as  the  very  name  of  the  judgment  shows, 
hypothetical,  and  may  possibly  not  represent 
any  actual  occurrence,  besides  being,  what  causa- 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         117 

tion  is  not,  independent  of  time.  A  particu- 
lar case  of  causation  may  be  hypothetical  in 
respect  to  our  belief  that  it  actually  occurred; 
never  the  law  of  causation  itself  as  a  general  truth. 
And  the  same  distinction  applies  with  even 
greater  force  to  the  alleged  connection  between 
a  logical  disjunction  and  a  physical  reaction. 
When  I  say  A  is  either  B  or  C,  but  not  both,  there 
is  only  this  much  resemblance,  that  both  cases 
involve  the  ideas  of  equality  and  of  opposition. 
From  the  admission  that  A  is  not  B,  I  infer  that  it 
is  C,  or,  contrariwise,  from  the  admission  that  it 
is  B,  I  infer  that  it  is  not  C,  and  in  both  instances 
with  the  same  certainty ;  but  this  does  not  prove 
that  the  earth  attracts  the  moon  as  much  as  the 
moon  attracts  the  earth,  only  in  opposite 
directions;  nor  yet  that  in  certain  instances  all 
the  heat  lost  by  one  body  is  gained  by  another. 

Kant  had  learned  this  much  from  Hume,  that 
causation  is  essentially  a  relation  of  antecedence 
and  consequence  in  time;  and  apparently  his 
way  of  "  categorising"  the  relation — i.e.,  of 
proving  its  apriority — is  to  represent  it  as  the 
logical  form  of  reason  and  consequent  mas- 
querading, so  to  speak,  under  the  intuitional 
time-form.  Yet  he  frequently  speaks  of  our 
senses  as  being  affected  by  things  in  themselves, 
implying  that  the  resulting  sensations  are  some- 
how caused  by  those  otherwise  unknown  entities. 
But  since  things  in  themselves  do  not,  according 


n8  Modern  Philosophy 

to  Kant,  exist  in  space  and  time,  they  cannot  be 
causally  related  to  phenomena  or  to  anything 

else. 

• 

In  his  criticism  of  Pure  Reason,  properly  so 
called — that  is,  of  inferences  made  by  human 
faculty  with  regard  to  questions  transcending 
all  experience — Kant  shows  that  of  such  things 
nothing  can  be  known.  The  ideality  of  time  and 
space  once  taken  as  proved,  this  amount  of 
agnosticism  seems  to  follow  as  a  matter  of  course. 
It  is  idle  to  speculate  about  the  possible  extent 
or  duration  of  a  universe  that  cannot  be  de- 
scribed in  terms  of  coexistence  and  succession. 
For  each  of  us  at  the  dissolution  of  our  bodily 
organism  time  itself,  and  therefore  existence 
as  alone  we  conceive  it,  comes  to  an  end. 
The  law  of  causation,  applying  as  it  does  to 
phenomena  alone,  offers  no  evidence  for  the 
existence  of  a  God  who  transcends  phenomena. 
Kant,  however,  is  not  satisfied  with  such  a 
simple  and  summary  procedure  as  this.  He 
tries  to  show,  with  most  unnecessary  pedantry, 
that  the  conditional  synthesis  of  the  Under- 
standing inevitably  leads  thought  on  to  the 
unconditional  synthesis  of  the  Reason,  only  to 
find  itself  lost  in  a  hopeless  welter  of  para- 
logisms and  self-contradictions. 

At  this  stage  we  are  handed  over  to  the  guid- 
ance of  what  Kant  calls  the  Practical  Reason. 
1J  This  faculty  gives  a  synthesis  for  conduct,  as  Pure 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         119 

Reason  gave  a  synthesis  for  intelligence.  -All  rea- 
son demands  uniformity,  order,  law;  only  what 
in  theory  is  recognised  as  true  has  in  practice  to 
be  imposed  as  right.  In  this  way  Kant  arrives 
at  his  formula  of  absolute  morality:  Act  so  that 
the  principle  of  thy  conduct  may  be  the  law  for 
all  rational  beings.  He  calls  this  the  Categorical 
Imperative,  as  distinguished  from  such  hy- 
pothetical imperatives  as:  Act  this  way  if  you 
wish  to  be  happy  either  here  or  hereafter;  or, 
act  as  public  opinion  tells  you.  Moreover,  the 
motive,  as  distinguished  from  the  end  of  moral 
action,  should  not  be  calculating  self-interest 
nor  uncalculating  impulse,  but  simply  desire  to 
fulfil  the  law  as  such.  Previous  moralists  had 
set  up  the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest 
number  as  the  end  of  action,  and  such  an 
aim  does  not  lie  far  from  Kant's  philosophy; 
but  they  could  think  of  no  better  motive  for 
pursuing  it  than  self-love  or  a  rather  unde- 
fined social  instinct ;  and  their  summum  bonum 
would  take  the  happiness  of  irrational  animals 
into  account,  while  Kant  absolutely  subordinates 
the  interests  of  these  to  human  good.  A  further 
coincidence  between  the  Utilitarian  and  the 
Kantian  ethics  is  tliat  in  t&e  latter  also  the  happi- 
ness of  others,  not  their  perfection,  should  be 
the  end  and  aim  of  each.  Finally,  the  philosophy 
of  Pure  Reason  adopts  from  contemporary 
French  thought  as  the  governing  idea  of  political 


120  Modern  Philosophy 

organisation  what  was  long  to  be  a  principle  of 
English  Utilitarianism — "the  liberty  of  each, 
bounded  only  by  the  equal  liberty  of  all." 

Nevertheless,  the  old  postulate  of  a  necessary 
connection  between  virtue  and  individual  happi- 
ness reappears  in  Kant's  ethical  theory,  and 
leads  to  the  construction  of  a  new  religious  philo- 
sophy. His  critique  had  left  no  place  for  the 
old  theology,  nor  yet  for  that  doctrine  of  free- 
will so  dear  to  most  theologians.  Its  whole 
object  had  been  to  vindicate  against  Hume  the 
necessity  and  universality  of  causation.  Human 
actions  then  must,  like  all  other  phenomena, 
form  an  unbroken  chain  of  antecedents  and 
consequents.  Nor  does  Kant  conceal  his  con- 
viction that,  with  sufficient  knowledge  and 
powers  of  calculation,  a  man's  whole  future 
conduct  might  be  foretold.  Nevertheless,  under 
the  eighteenth-century  idea  of  man  as  naturally 
the  creature  of  passion  or  self-interest,  he  claims 
for  us,  as  moral  agents,  the  power  of  choosing 
to  obey  duty  in  preference  to  either.  And  this 
freedom  is  supposed  to  be  made  conceivable  by 
the  subjectivity  of  time  and  causation,  outside 
of  which,  as  a  thing  in  itself,  stands  the  moral 
will.  That  morality,  whether  as  action  or  mere 
intention,  involves  succession  in  time  is  utterly 
ignored.  Nor  is  this  all.  Assuming  without 
warrant  that  the  moral  law  demands  an  ultimate 
coincidence  between  happiness  and  virtue,  made 


The  Theorists  of  Knowledge         121 

impossible  in  this  life  by  human  weakness,  Kant 
argues  that  there  must  be  an  unending  future 
life  to  secure  time  enough  for  working  out  a 
problem  whose  solution  is  infinitely  remote. 
And,  finally,  there  must  be  an  omnipotent  moral 
God  to  provide  facilities  for  undertaking  that 
somewhat  gratuitous  Psyche's  task.  Before 
Kant  moral  theology  had  argued  that  the 
Judge  of  all  the  world  must  do  right,  appor- 
tioning happiness  to  desert.  It  was  reserved  for 
him  to  argue,  conversely,  that  for  right  to  be 
done  such  a  Judge  must  exist,  and  that  therefore 
he  does  exist. 

In  appreciating  the  services  of  Kant  to  philo- 
sophy we  must  guard  ourselves  against  being 
influenced  by  the  extravagant  panegyrics  of  his 
countrymen,  whose  passion  for  square  circles  he 
so  generously  gratifies.  Still,  after  every  de- 
duction for  mere  Laputian  pedantry  has  been 
made,  the  balance  of  fruitful  suggestion  remains 
vast,  (i.)  The  antithesis  of  object  and  subject, 
although  not  counted  among  the  categories  of 
his  Critique,  has  remained  a  prime  category  of 
thought  ever  since,  (ii.)  The  idea  of  a  necessary 
limit  to  human  knowledge,  given  by  the  very 
theory  of  that  knowledge,  as  distinguished  from 
the  Scepticism  of  the  Greeks — in  other  words, 
what  we  now  call  Agnosticism — may  not  be 
final,  but  it  still  remains  to  be  dealt  with,  (iii.) 
The  possibility  of  reducing  a  priori  knowledge  to 


122  Modern  Philosophy 

a  form  of  unconscious  experience  has  put  an  end 
to  dogmatic  metaphysics,  (iv.)  The  problems 
of  Time  and  Space  have  taken  a  central  place  in 
speculation;  it  has  been  shown — what  Hume 
did  not  see — that  Causation  has  the  certainty  of 
a  mathematical  axiom;  and  it  has  been  made 
highly  probable  that  all  these  difficulties  may 
find  their  solution  in  a  larger  interpretation  of 
experience,  (v.)  Morality  has  been  definitely 
dissociated  from  the  appeal  to  selfish  interests, 
whether  in  this  life  or  in  another. 

We  have  now  to  trace,  within  the  limits  pre- 
scribed by  the  nature  of  this  work,  the  de- 
velopment of  philosophy  under  Kant's  German 
successors. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   GERMAN    IDEALISTS 

Fichte,    Schelling,    Hegel,    Schopenhauer, 
Herbart. 

THE  Critical  Philosophy  won  its  first  success 
in  Germany  less  as  a  new  epistemology 
than  as  what,  in  fact,  its  author  meant  it  to  be, 
a  rehabilitation  of  religious  belief.  The  limits  of 
Reason  had  been  drawn  so  closely  only  to  make 
room  for  Faith.  But  the  current  of  Rationalism 
was  running  too  strongly  to  be  so  summarily 
stopped;  and  so  with  Kant's  ablest  successors 
faith  is  altogether  abandoned,  while  the  claims  of 
reason  are  pushed  relentlessly  through.  Among 
these  more  logical  thinkers  the  first  is  J.  G. 
Fichte  (1762-1814).  In  him — for  the  third 
time  in  modern  history,  for  the  first  and  last 
time  in  Germany — the  hero  as  philosopher  finds 
a  worthy  representative,  Born  in  Silesia,  like 
Kant  of  humble  parentage,  and  bred  in  circum- 
stances of  more  oppressive  poverty,  he  also 
received  a  severely  religious  and  moral  training 
as  a  preparation  for  the  pastoral  office.  The 
123 


124  Modern  Philosophy 

bounty  of  an  aristocratic  patron  gave  him  an 
excellent  public-school  education;  but  as  a 
university  student,  first  at  Jena  and  then  at  Leip- 
zig, he  had  to  earn  a  scanty  living  by  private 
tuition,  finally  abandoning  his  destined  career 
to  accept  a  post  in  a  Swiss  family  at  Zurich, 
There,  as  the  result  of  an  attachment  in  which 
the  love  was  nearly  all  on  the  lady's  side,  he 
became  engaged  to  a  niece  of  the  poet  Klopstock, 
and  after  a  long  delay,  caused  by  money  difficult- 
ies, was  enabled  to  marry  her.  In  the  meantime 
he  had  become  a  convert  to  Kant's  philosophy, 
winning  the  admiration  of  the  old  master 
himself  by  a  Critique  of  all  Revelation,  written 
in  four  weeks.  Published  anonymously  by  an 
oversight,  it  was  generally  attributed  to  Kant 
himself,  and,  on  the  real  authorship  becoming 
known,  won  for  Fichte  an  extraordinary  Pro- 
fessorate of  Philosophy  at  Jena,  where  his  success 
as  a  lecturer  and  writer  gave  him  for  a  time  the 
leadership  in  German  speculation  (1794-1799). 
An  untoward  incident  brought  this  stage  of  his 
career  to  an  end.  Writing  in  a  philosophical 
review,  he  defined  God  as  "  the  moral  order  of  the 
universe."  Dr.  Temple  long  afterwards  used 
much  the  same  phrase  when  Bishop  of  Exeter, 
finding  it,  presumably,  compatible  with  official 
Theism ;  but  such  was  not  the  impression  created 
in  Saxony.  A  cry  of  atheism  arose,  much  to  the 
disgust  of  Fichte,  whose  position  would  have  been 


The  German  Idealists  125 

better  described  as  pantheistic.  But  what  in- 
censed him  most  was  the  suspicion  of  an  attempt 
to  interfere  with  the  liberty  of  academic  teaching. 
With  his  usual  impetuosity  he  talked  about 
resigning  his  chair — with  a  hint  that  others 
would  follow  his  example — were  the  authorities 
at  Weimar  to  permit  such  an  outrage.  Goethe, 
who  was  then  Minister,  observed  that  no  Govern- 
ment could  allow  itself  to  be  threatened,  and 
Fichte  was  at  once  relieved  of  his  post.  Settling 
at  Berlin,  he  became  Professor  of  Philosophy 
in  the  new  University  founded  after  the  French 
conquest  of  Prussia,  having  previously  done 
much  to  revive  the  National  spirit  by  his 
Addresses  to  the  German  Nation  (1807-1808), 
These  were  in  appearance  the  programme  of  a 
new  educational  Utopia;  but  their  real  purpose 
was  so  evident  that  the  speaker  lived  in  daily 
expectation  of  being  summoned  before  a  French 
court-martial  and  shot .  Unlike  his  countrymen , 
Goethe,  Hegel,  and  Schopenhauer,  Fichte  pas- 
sionately resented  the  Napoleonic  despotism, 
throwing  himself  heart  and  soul  into  the  great 
uprising  by  which  it  was  finally  overthrown. 
Although  his  wish  to  accompany  the  victorious 
army  as  field  preacher  could  not  be  gratified,  the 
campaign  of  1813  still  claimed  him  as  one  of  its 
victims.  After  nursing  his  heroic  wife  to  re- 
covery from  a  hospital  fever  caught  in  attend- 
ance on  the  sick  and  wounded  at  Berlin,  he  took 


126  Modern  Philosophy 

the  infection  from  her  and  died  early  in  1814, 
soon  after  hearing  that  Blucher  had  crossed 
the  Rhine. 

G.   H.    Lewes,   in   a   well-known   story,    has 
made  himself   and   his   readers   merry  over  a 
German  savant  who  undertakes  to  evolve  the 
idea  of  a  camel  out  of  the  depths  of  his  moral 
consciousness.    The  phrase  is  commonly  quoted 
as   "  inner  consciousness, "  but  this  takes  away 
its   whole    point.        For   the   original    satirist, 
who,  I  think,  was  not  Lewes,  but  Heine,  had  in 
view  the  philosophy  of  Fichte.     It  need  hardly 
be  said   that   German  savants  are  as  careful 
observers  and  diligent  collectors  of  facts  as  any 
others ;  and  Fichte  in  particular  trusted  solely  to 
experience  for  the  knowledge  of  natural  pheno- 
mena.    But  even  as  regards  his  general  philo- 
sophy, the  place  it  gives  to  morality  has  been 
misconceived    even    by    his   closest    students. 
With    him    good-will    really   plays   a   less   im- 
portant part  than   with   Kant,   being   not    an 
end  in  itself,  but  a  means  towards  an  end.  And 
what  that  end  is  his  teaching  makes  quite  clear. 
Kant's  first  critics  put  their  finger  on  the  weak 
point  of  his  system,  the  thing  in  itself.     So, 
assuming  it  to  be  discarded,  Fichte  set  to  work 
on  new  lines,  the  lines  of  pure  idealism.     But, 
though  an  idealist,  he  is  not,  any  more  than 
Berkeley,  a  solipsist.     The  celebrated  antithesis 
of  the  ego  and  the  non-ego  dates  from  him,  and 


The  German  Idealists  127 

strikes  the  keynote  of  his  whole  system.  It 
might  be  thought  that,  as  compared  with  the 
old  realism,  this  was  a  distinction  without 
a  difference.  But  that  is  not  so;  for,  accord- 
ing to  Fichte,  the  non-ego  is  subjective  in  its 
origin,  and  that  is  where  he  departs  widely 
from  Berkeley's  theological  idealism.  Not  that 
I  create  the  not-myself;  I  assume  it  as  the  con- 
dition of  my  self-consciousness — a  remarkable 
feat  of  logic,  but  after  all  not  more  wonderful 
than  that  space  and  time  should  result  from  the 
activity  of  the  outer  and  inner  senses.  This  fig- 
ment of  my  imagination  is  anyhow  solid  enough 
to  beget  a  new  feeling  of  resistance  and  recoil, 
throwing  the  self  back  on  itself,  and  bringing 
with  it  the  interpretation  of  that  external  impact 
by  the  category  of  causation,  of  its  own  activity 
as  substance,  and  of  the  whole  ideal  between  the 
ego  and  the  non-ego  as  interaction  or  reciprocity. 
In  this  way  the  first  triad  of  thesis,  antithesis, 
and  synthesis  is  obtained;  and  from  this,  by  a 
vast  expenditure  of  ingenuity,  the  whole  array 
of  Kant's  forms,  categories,  and  faculties  is 
evolved  as  a  coherent  system  of  scientific  thought 
in  obedience  to  a  single  principle — the  self- 
realisation  of  the  ego,  alternatively  admitting 
and  transcending  a  limit  to  its  activity. 

It  will  be  easily  understood  that  this  self- 
realising  ego  is  neither  Fichte's  nor  anyone 
else's  self,  but  a  universal  principle,  funda- 


128  Modern  Philosophy 

mentally  the  same  in  all.  One  is  reminded  of 
Descartes's  self-thinking  thought  by  which  the 
reality  of  the  universe  was  guaranteed;  but 
between  the  two  there  is  this  vast  difference,  that 
the  Frenchman's  ego  resembles  a  box  contain- 
ing a  variety  of  independent  ideas,  to  be  sepa- 
rately handled  and  examined;  the  German's  is 
a  box  enclosing  a  coiled-up  spring  by  the  ex- 
pansion of  which  all  the  wheels  of  the  philo- 
sophical machine  are  made  to  go  round.  From 
the  action  of  the  not-self  on  the  self  results  the 
whole  of  nature  as  we  conceive  it ;  from  the  reac- 
tion of  the  self  on  the  not-self,  the  whole  men- 
tality and  morality  of  man — morality  being 
understood  to  include  the  domestic,  social, 
political,  educational,  and  industrial  organi- 
sation of  life.  The  final  cause,  the  impelling 
ideal  of  existence,  is  the  self-realisation  of  the  ego, 
the  entire  absorption  into  its  personal  energy  of 
the  non-ego,  of  nature,  to  be  effected  by  perfect 
knowledge  of  how  the  physical  universe  is  con- 
stituted issuing  in  perfect  subjugation  of  its 
forces  to  the  human  will.  But  such  a  realisation 
of  the  Absolute  Ego  would  mean  its  annihilation, 
for,  as  we  have  seen,  the  antithesis  between 
objective  and  subjective  is  the  very  condition  of 
consciousness,  that  without  which  it  could  nei- 
ther begin  nor  continue  to  exist.  Therefore  the 
process  must  go  on  for  ever,  and  this  necessity 
guarantees  the  eternal  duration  of  the  human 


The  German  Idealists  129 

race — not,  as  Kant  had  dreamed,  of  the  individ- 
ual soul,  since  for  Fichte  the  Categorical  Impera- 
tive demands  a  consummation  widely  different 
from  that  combination  of  virtue  with  happiness 
which  had  satisfied  his  master.  And  the  agency 
by  which  it  is  being  effected  through  infinite 
time  is  not  a  personal  God,  but  that  moral  order 
of  the  world  which  Fichte  regarded  as  the  only 
true  object  of  religious  feeling.  As  for  human 
immortality,  he  seems  to  have  first  accepted,  but 
afterwards  rejected  it  in  favour  of  a  mystical 
union  with  the  divine. 

£^It  has  been  said  that  morality  was  not  with 
Fichte  what  it  had  been  with  Kant — the  highest 
good.  Nevertheless,  as  a  means  towards  the 
final  synthesis,  morality  interested  him  intensely, 
and  his  best  work  has  been  done  in  ethics. 
As  a  condition  of  self-realisation  the  primal  ego 
becomes  personified  in  a  multitude  of  free  in- 
dividualities. Just  as  in  Stoicism,  each  indi- 
vidual is  conceived  as  having  a  special  office  to 
perform  in  the  world-process,  and  the  State 
exists — ideally  speaking — in  order  to  guarantee 
the  necessary  independence  of  all  its  citizens. 
For  this  purpose  everyone  must  have  the  right 
to  work  and  the  right  to  a  living  wage.  Thus 
Fichte  appears  as  the  first  theorist  of  State 
Socialism  in  the  history  of  German  thought. 
Probably  the  example  of  the  Greek  Stoics  with 
their  communistic  Utopias  acting  on  a  kindred 


130  Modern  Philosophy 

spirit,  rather  than  any  prophetic  vision  of 
the  coming  century,  is  to  be  credited  for  this 
remarkable  anticipation. 

Schelling 

German  philosophy  is  prolific  of  self-contra- 
dictions ;  and  so  far  the  most  flagrant  example  has 
been  offered  by  Fichte's  Theory  of  Knowledge, 
starting  as  it  does  with  the  idea  of  an  impersonal 
ego,  developing  through  a  process  in  which  this 
selfless  self  demands  its  own  negation  at  every 
step,  and  determined  by  the  prospect  of  a 
catastrophe  that  would  be  the  annihilation  of 
consciousness  itself.  In  fact,  there  seemed  no 
need  to  wait  until  time  had  run  out ;  the  self,  or, 
as  it  was  now  called,  the  subject,  had  absorbed  all 
reality,  only  to  find  that  the  material  universe, 
reconstituted  as  the  object  of  knowledge,  was  an 
indispensable  condition  of  its  existence.  And 
meanwhile  the  physical  sciences,  more  particu- 
larly those  concerned  with  inorganic  nature, 
were  entering  on  a  series  of  triumphs  unpar- 
alleled since  the  days  of  Newton.  Philosophy 
must  come  to  terms  with  these  or  cease  to  exist. 

The  task  of  reconciliation  was  first  attempted 
by  P.  W.  J.  Schelling  (1775-1854),  a  Suabian, 
and  the  first  South  German  who  made  a  name  in 
pure  philosophy.  Educated  at  the  University 
of  Tubingen,  at  an  early  age  he  covered  an 
encyclopaedic  range  of  studies  and  began  author- 


The  German  Idealists  131 

ship  at  nineteen,  gaining  a  professorship  at  Jena 
four  years  later.  Wandering  about  from  one 
university  to  another,  and  putting  forward  new 
opinions  as  often  as  he  changed  his  residence, 
the  young  adventurer  ceased  to  publish  after 
1 1 813,  and  remained  silent  till  in  1841  he  came 
'forward  at  Berlin  as  the  champion  of  a  re- 
actionary current,  practically  renouncing  the 
naturalistic  pantheism  by  which  his  early  repu- 
tation had  been  made.  But  he  utterly  failed 
in  the  attempt,  which  was  finally  abandoned  in 
the  fifth  year  from  its  inception.  Lewes,  who 
saw  Schelling  in  his  old  age,  describes  him  as 
remarkably  like  Socrates;  his  admirers  called 
him  a  modern  Plato ;  but  he  had  nothing  of  the 
deep  moral  earnestness  that  characterised  either, 
nor  indeed  was  morality  needed  for  the  work  that 
he  actually  did.  This,  to  use  the  phrase  of  his 
fellow-student  Hegel,  consisted  in  raising  philo- 
sophy to  its  absolute  standpoint,  in  passing  from 
the  subjective  moralism  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury to  the  all-comprehensive  systematisation 
of  the  nineteenth. 

Schelling  began  as  a  disciple  of  Fichte,  but  he 
came  simultaneously  under  the  influence  of  Spi- 
noza, whose  fame  had  been  incessantly  spread- 
ing through  the  last  generation  in  Germany, 
with  some  reinforcement  from  the  revived  name 
of  Bruno.  Their  teaching  served  to  make  the 
latent  pantheism  of  Fichte  more  explicit,  while 


132  Modern  Philosophy 

the  great  contemporary  discoveries  gave  a 
new  interest  to  the  study  of  nature,  which 
Fichte,  unlike  Kant,  had  put  in  the  background, 
strictly  subordinating  it  to  the  moral  service 
of  man.  Had  he  cared  to  evolve  the  idea  of 
a  camel  from  his  moral  consciousness,  the 
operation  would  not  have  demanded  several 
years,  but  only  a  few  minutes*  thought.  As 
thus:  the  moral  development  of  humanity 
needed  the  co-operation  of  such  a  race  as  the 
Semites.  To  form  their  character  a  long  resi- 
dence^ in  the  Arabian  deserts  was  needed.  But 
for  su'ch  nomads  an  auxiliary  animal  would  be 
needed  with  long  legs  and  neck,  a  stomach  for 
storing  water,  hump,  etc. — Q.  E.  D.  Schelling 
also  began  by  explaining  the  material  world  as  a 
preparation  for  the  spiritual;  only  he  did  not 
employ  the  method  of  teleological  adaptation, 
but  a  method  of  rather  fanciful  analogy.  As  the 
evolution  of  self-conscious  reason  had  proceeded 
by  a  triple  movement  of  thesis,  antithesis,  and 
synthesis,  so  a  parallel  process  had  to  be  dis- 
covered in  the  advance  towards  a  consciousness 
supposed  to  be  exhibited  in  organic  and  inorganic 
nature. 

The  fundamental  idea  of  natural  philosophy  is 
polarity — opposite  forces  combining  to  neutralise 
one  another  and  then  parting  to  be  reunited  at  a 
higher  stage  of  evolution.  Thus  attraction  and 
repulsion — represented  as  space  and  time — by 


The  German  Idealists  133 

their  synthesis  compose  matter;  magnetism  and 
electricity  produce  chemical  affinity ;  life  results 
from  a  triad  of  inorganic  forces;  in  life  itself 
productivity  and  irritability  give  birth  to  sen- 
sibility. The  order  of  the  terms  made  little,  if 
any,  difference.  When  long  afterwards  iron 
was  magnetised  by  the  electric  current,  Schell- 
ing  claimed  for  himself  the  credit  of  antici- 
pating this  discovery,  although  he  had  placed 
magnetism  before  electricity. 

The  next  step  was  to  construct  a  philosophy  of 
history.  This,  with  much  else,  is  included  under 
the  name  of  A  System  of  Transcendental  Idealism 
(1800)  in  the  most  finished  of  Schelling's  literary 
compositions.  History,  according  to  the  view 
here  unfolded,  is  the  gradual  self-revelation  of 
God,  or  the  Absolute,  in  whom  Nature  and  Spirit 
are  united  and  identified,  who  never  is  nor  can 
be,  but  always  is  to  be.  Meanwhile  the  supreme 
ideal  is  not  that  ever-increasing  mastery  of 
nature  by  man  which  Fichte  contemplated,  but 
their  reconciliation  as  achieved  by  Art.  For 
just  as  natural  philosophy  carried  an  element  of 
consciousness  into  the  material  universe,  so 
aestheticism  recognises  a  corresponding  element 
of  unconscious  creation  in  the  supreme  works  of 
artistic  genius  where  spirit  reaches  its  highest 
and  best.  Here  Schelling  appears  as  the  philo- 
sopher of  Romanticism,  a  movement  that 
characterised  German  thought  from  1795  to 


134  Modern  Philosophy 

1805,  and  is  known  to  ourselves  by  the  faded  and 
feeble  image  of  it  exhibited  in  a  certain  section  of 
English  society  nearly  a  century  later.  Begin- 
ning with  a  more  cultivated  intelligence  of 
Hellenic  antiquity,  this  movement  rapidly  grew 
into  a  new  appreciation  of  medieval  culture, 
falsely  supposed  to  have  given  more  scope  to 
individuality  than  modern  civilisation,  and 
then  into  a  search  for  ever- varying  sources  of 
excitement  or  distraction  in  the  whole  history, 
art,  and  literature  of  past  or  present  times, 
religion  being  at  last  singled  out  as  the  vitalising 
principle  of  all. 

Singularly  enough,  Fichte  accepted  the  Tran- 
scendental Idealism  as  an  orthodox  exposition  of 
his  own  philosophy.  But  its  composition  seems  to 
have  given  Schelling  the  consciousness  of  his  own 
independence.  Soon  afterwards  he  defined  the 
new  position  as  a  philosophy  of  Identity  or  of 
Indifference.  Nature  and  Spirit,  like  Spinoza's 
Thought  and  Extension,  were  all  the  same  and 
all  one — that  is  to  say,  in  their  totality  or  in  the 
Absolute.  For,  considered  as  appearances,  they 
might  present  quantitative  differences  deter- 
mined by  the  varying  preponderance  of  the  ob- 
jective or  of  the  subjective  side.  In  this  way 
Schelling  found  himself  able  to  repeat  his  fanciful 
construction  of  the  forces  and  forms  of  nature  in 
successive  triads  under  new  names.  The  essen- 
tial departure  from  Fichte,  who  repudiated  the 


The  German  Idealists  135 

Philosophy  of  Identity  with  undisguised  con- 
tempt, was  that  it  practically  repudiated  the 
idea  of  an  eternal  progress  in  man's  ever- 
growing mastery  of  nature.  But,  in  spite  of 
all  disclaimers,  the  master  silently  followed  his 
former  disciple's  evolution  in  the  direction  of 
a  pantheistic  monism.  His  later  writings  re- 
present God  no  longer  as  the  moral  order  of  the 
world,  but,  like  Spinoza,  as  the  world's  eternal 
Being,  of  which  man's  knowledge  is  the  reflected 
image.  Finally,  both  philosophers  accepted  the 
Christian  doctrines  of  the  Fall,  the  Incarnation, 
and  the  Trinity  as  mythical  symbols  of  an 
eternal  process  in  which  God,  after  becoming 
alienated  from  himself  in  the  material  universe, 
returns  to  himself  in  man's  consciousness  of 
identity  with  the  Absolute.  Instead  of  the  rather 
abrupt  method  of  position,  negation,  and  re- 
affirmation  known  as  Thesis,  Antithesis,  and 
Synthesis,  we  have  here  the  more  fluid  process  of 
a  spiral  movement,  departing  from  and  returning 
to  itself.  And  this  was  to  be  the  very  main- 
spring of  the  system  that  next  comes  up  for 
consideration. 

Hegel 

G.  W.  F.  Hegel  (1770-1831),  in  the  opinion  of 
some  good  judges  Germany's  greatest  philo- 
sopher, was,  like  Schelling,  a  Suabian,  and 
intimately  associated  with  his  younger  con- 


136  Modern  Philosophy 

temporary,  first  at  Tubingen  and  afterwards  at 
Jena,  where  the  two  friends  jointly  conducted 
a  philosophical  review.  But  they  gradually 
drifted  apart.  Hegel  was  not  a  romanticist, 
but  a  classic;  not  a  naturalist,  but  a  humanist. 
Largely  influenced  by  Greek  thought  and  Greek 
literature,  for  which  he  continued  to  be  an  en- 
thusiast through  life,  he  readily  accepted,  as 
against  Kant  and  Fichte,  the  change  from  a 
purely  subjective  to  an  objective  point  of  view. 
But,  although  he  gave  some  attention  to  physical 
science,  Hegel  was  less  interested  in  it  than  his 
colleague,  with  whose  crude  and  fanciful  meta- 
physics he  also  failed  to  sympathise.  With 
the  publication  of  Hegel's  first  important  work, 
the  Phenomenology  of  Mind  (i  807) ,  things  came  to 
a  breach ;  for  its  preface  amounts  to  a  declaration 
of  war  against  the  philosophy  of  Romanticism. 
Schelling  himself  is  not  named;  but  there  is 
no  mistaking  the  object  of  certain  picturesque 
references  to  "  exploding  the  Absolute  on  us/' 
and  "the  darkness  in  which  every  cow  is  black." 
Next  year  Hegel  became  what  we  should  call 
headmaster  of  a  public  school  at  Nuremberg, 
filling  that  post  for  eight  years,  during  which 
his  greatest  work,  the  System  of  Logic,  in  three 
volumes,  was  composed  and  published.  He 
then  obtained  a  chair  of  philosophy  at  Heidel- 
berg, passing  thence  to  Berlin  in  1818,  where  he 
taught  until  his  death  by  cholera  in  1831. 


G.  W.  F.  HEGEL 


The  German  Idealists  137 

David  Strauss,  who  saw  the  revered  teacher  a  few 
days  before  the  fatal  seizure,  describes  him  first 
as  he  appeared  in  the  lecture-room,  "looking, 
ever  so  old,  bent  and  coughing";  then  in  his 
home  "  looking  ten  years  younger,  with  clear 
blue  eyes,  and  showing  the  most  beautiful  white 
teeth  when  he  smiled."  He  had  published  a 
summary  of  his  whole  system,  under  the  name 
of  an  Encyclopaedia  of  the  Philosophical  Scien- 
ces, in  1817,  and  a  Philosophy  of  Law — which  is 
really  a  treatise  on  Government — in  1812.  His 
sympathies  were  with  bureaucratic  absolutism  in 
a  modernised  form,  with  Napoleon  against  the 
German  patriots,  with  the  restored  Prussian 
Government  against  the  new  Liberalism,  with 
English  Toryism  against  the  Whigs  of  the  Re- 
form Bill,  and  finally  with  the  admirers  of  war 
against  the  friends  of  peace. 

Hegel's  collected  works,  published  after  his 
death,  fill  over  twenty  good-sized  volumes. 
Besides  the  treatises  already  mentioned,  they 
include  his  Lectures  on  the  History  of  Philosophy, 
the  Philosophy  of  History,  the  Philosophy  of 
Religion,  ^Esthetics,  etc.,  made  up  with  much 
literary  skill  from  the  Professor's  own  notes  and 
from  the  reports  of  his  hearers.  The  most 
permanently  valuable  of  these  is  the  ^Esthetics; 
but  any  student  desirous  of  getting  a  notion 
of  Hegelianism  at  first  hand  had  better  begin 
with  the  Philosophy  of  History,  of  which  there  is 


138  Modern  Philosophy 

a  good  and  cheap  English  translation  in  one  of 
Bonn's  Libraries.  Some  general  points  of  view 
serving  to  connect  the  system  with  its  pre- 
decessors are  all  that  room  can  be  found  for 
here. 

As  compared  with  Kant,  Hegel  is  distinguished 
above  all  by  his  complete  abjuration  of  the 
agnostic  standpoint  in  epistemology.  "The 
universe  is  penetrable  to  thought' ':  an  un- 
knowable thing  in  itself  does  not  exist.  In- 
deed, the  intelligible  reality  of  things  is  just 
what  we  know  best ;  the  unaccountable  residuum, 
if  any,  lurks  in  the  details  of  their  appearance. 
So  also  in  Greek  philosophy  Hegel  holds  that  the 
truth  was  not  in  the  ideal  world  of  Plato,  but  in 
the  self-realising  Forms  of  Aristotle.  As  against 
Fichte,  Hegel  will  not  allow  that  the  recon- 
i  ciliation  of  the  subjective  with  the  objective  is  an 
infinitely  "far-off  divine  event";  on  the  contrary 
it  is  a  process  being  continually  realised  by  our- 
selves and  all  about  us.  In  his  homely  expression, 
the  very  animals  as  they  eat  turn  their  food  into 
consciousness,  in  utter  disregard  of  prejudice. 
But  Fichte's  condemnation  of  Schelling's  Indif- 
ferentism  is  quite  right.  The  Absolute  is  Mind. 
Nature  exists  only  as  the  lower  stage,  whence 
Spirit  emerges  to  contradict,  to  confront,  and  to 
explain  her  as  the  necessary  preparation  for  his 
supreme  self-assertion.  And  Fichte  was  right 
in  working  out  his  system  by  the  dialectical 


The  German  Idealists  139 

method  of  contradiction  and  solution,  as  against 
the  dogmatism  that  summarily  decrees  the 
Absolute,  without  taking  the  trouble  to  reason  it 
out,  in  imitation  of  the  plan  pursued  by  the 
universe  in  becoming  conscious  of  itself. 

The  most  portentous  thing  about  Hegel's 
philosophy  is  this  notion  of  the  world's  having, 
so  to  speak,  argued  itself  into  existence.  To 
rationalise  the  sum  of  being,  to  explain,  without 
assumptions,  why  there  should  be  anything,  and 
then  why  it  should  be  as  we  know  it,  had  been 
a  problem  suggested  by  Plato  and  solved  rather 
summarily  by  Spinoza's  challenge  to  conceive 
Infinite  Power  as  non-existing.  Hegel  is  more 
patient  and  ingenious ;  but,  after  all,  his  superi- 
ority merely  consists  in  spinning  the  web  of 
arbitrary  dialectic  so  fine  that  we  can  hardly  see 
the  thread.  The  root-idea  is  to  identify,  or 
rather  to  confuse,  caugdl  evolution  with  logic. 
The  chain  of  causes  and  effects  that  constitutes 
the  universe  is  made  out  to  be  one  with  the 
series  of  reasons  and  consequents  by  which  the 
conclusion  is  demonstrated.  As  usual,  the  equa- 
tion is  effected  by  a  transference  of  terms  from 
each  side  to  the  other.  The  categories  and  pro- 
cesses of  logic  are  credited  with  a  life  and 
movement  that  belong  only  to  the  human 
reasoner  operating  with  them.  And  the  mov- 
ing, interacting  masses  of  which  the  material 
universe  consists  are  represented  as  parties  to  a 


140  Modern  Philosophy 

dialectical  discussion  in  which  one  denies  what 
the  other  asserts  until  it  is  discovered,  on  lifting 
the  argument  to  a  higher  plane,  that  after  all 
they  are  agreed.  Nor  is  this  all.  The  world  as 
we  know  it  is  composed  of  coexistent  elements 
grouped  together  or  distinguished  according  to 
their  resemblances  and  differences  as  so  many 
natural  kinds;  and  of  successive  events  linked 
together  as  causes  and  effects.  But  while  there 
is  no  general  law  of  coexistence  except  such  as 
may  be  derived  from  the  collocation  of  the 
previously  existing  elements  whence  they  are 
derived,  there  is  a  law  of  causal  succession — 
namely,  this,  that  the  quantities  of  mass  and 
energy  involved  are  conserved  without  loss  or 
gain  through  all  time.  Now,  Hegel's  way  of 
rationalising  or,  in  plainer  words,  accounting  for 
the  coexistent  elements  and  their  qualities, 
is  to  bring  them  undei*  a  supposed  law  of  com- 
plementary opposition,  revived  from  Heraclei- 
tus,  according  to  which  everything  necessarily 
involves  the  existence,  both  in  thought  and 
reality,  of  its  contradictory.  And  the  same 
principle  is  applied  to  causal  succession — a 
proceeding  which  would  be  fatal  to  the  scientific 
law  of  conservation. 

There  is  another  way  of  rationalising  ex- 
perience— namely,  the  theological  hypothesis 
of  a  supreme  intelligence  by  which  the  world  was 
created  and  is  governed  with  a  view  to  the 


The  German  Idealists  141 

attainment  of  some  ultimate  good.  And  there  is 
a  sort  of  teleology  in  Hegel  evidently  inspired  by 
his  religious  education.  But  the  two  do  not 
mean  the  same  thing.  For  he  places  conscious 
reason  not  at  the  beginning  but  at  the  end  of 
evolution.  The  rationality  of  things  is  im- 
manent, not  transcendent.  Purposes  somehow 
work  retrospectively  so  as  to  determine  the 
course  of  events  towards  a  good  end.  That  end 
is  self-consciousness — not  yours  or  mine,  but  the 
world-spirit's  consciousness  and  possession  of  it- 
self. And  this  is  reached  in  four  ways:  in  Art 
by  intuition,  in  Religion  by  representation,  in 
Philosophy  by  conception,  in  History  and  Poli- 
tics by  the  realisation  of  righteousness  through 
the  agency  of  the  modern  State. 

Hegel  looked  on  this  world  and  this  life  of  ours 
as  the  only  world  and  the  only  life.  When 
Heine  pointed  to  the  starry  skies  he  told  the 
young  poet  that  the  stars  were  a  brilliant  leprosy 
on  the  face  of  the  heavens,  and  met  the  appeal 
for  future  compensation  with  the  sarcastic 
observation:  "So  you  expect  a  trinkgeld  for 
nursing  your  sick  mother  and  for  not  poisoning 
your  brother !" 

German  historians  have  justly  extolled  the 
ingenuity,  the  subtlety,  the  originality,  the 
systematising  power — unequalled  since  Aristotle 
— and  the  enormous  knowledge  of  their  country's 
chief  idealist.  But  this,  after  all,  amounts  to  no 


142  Modern  Philosophy 

more  than  claiming  for  Hegel  that  much  of  what 
he  said  is  true  and  that  much  is  new.  The  vital 
question  is  whether  what  is  new  is  also  true — 
and  this  is  more  than  they  seem  prepared  to 
maintain. 

Schopenhauer 


The  leaders  of  the  party  known  in  the 
fourth  and  fifth  decades  of  the  last  century  as 
Young  Germany,  among  whom  Heinrich  Heine 
(1797-1856)  was  the  most  brilliant  and  famous, 
were  more  or  less  associated  with  the  Hegelian 
school.  They  were,  however,  what  Hegel  was 
not,  political  revolutionists  with  a  tendency  to 
Socialism;  while  their  religious  rationalism, 
unlike  his,  was  openly  proclaimed.  The  tem- 
porary collapse  in  1849  of  the  movement  they 
initiated  brought  discredit  on  idealism  as  re- 
presented by  Germany's  classic  philosophers, 
which  also  had  been  seriously  damaged  by  the 
luminous  criticism  of  Trendelenburg,  the  neo- 
Aristotelian  professor  at  Berlin  (1802-1872). 

At  this  crisis  attention  was  drawn  to  the  long- 
neglected  writings  of  Arthur  Schopenhauer 
(1788-1860),  which  then  attained  a  vogue, that 
they  never  since  have  lost.  The  son  of  a  Ham- 
burg banker  and  of  a  literary  lady  whose  novels 
enjoyed  some  reputation  in  their  day,  he  was 
placed  from  the  beginning  in  a  position  of  greater 


ARTHUR  SCHOPENHAUER 


The  German  Idealists  143 

material  and  social  independence  than  usually 
falls  to  the  lot  of  German  thinkers ;  and  to  this, 
combined  with  the  fact  that  he  failed  entirely  as 
a  university  teacher,  it  is  partly  due  that  he  wrote 
about  philosophy  not  like  a  pedant,  but  like  a 
man  of  the  world.  At  the  same  time  the 
German  professors,  resenting  the  intrusion  of 
an  outsider  on  their  privileged  domain,  were 
strong  enough  to  prevent  the  reading  public 
from  ever  hearing  of  Schopenhauer's  existence 
until  an  article  in  the  Westminster  Review 
(April,  1853)  astonished  Germany  by  the  reve- 
lation that  she  possessed  a  thinker  whom  the 
man  in  the  street  could  understand. 

Schopenhauer  found  his  earliest  teachers  of 
philosophy  in  Plato  and  Kant.  He  then  at- 
tended Fichte's  lectures  at  Berlin.  At  some 
uncertain  date — probably  soon  after  taking 
his  doctor's  degree  in  1813 — at  the  suggestion  of 
an  Orientalist  he  took  up  the  study  of  the  Vedanta 
system.  All  these  various  influences  converged 
to  impress  him  with  the  belief  that  the  things  of 
sense  are  a  delusive  appearance  under  which  a 
fundamental  reality  lies  concealed.  According  to 
Hegel,  the  reality  is  reason ;  but  the  Romanticists, 
with  Schelling  at  their  head,  never  accepted  his 
conclusion,  thinking  of  the  absolute  rather  as  a 
blind,  unconscious  substance;  still  less  could  it 
please  Schopenhauer,  who  sought  for  the  supreme 
good  under  the  form  of  happiness  conceived  as 


144  Modern  Philosophy 

pleasure  unalloyed  by  pain.  A  gloomy  and 
desponding  temperament  combined,  as  in  the 
case  of  Byron  and  Rousseau,  with  passionately 
sensuous  instincts  and  anti-social  habits,  de- 
barred him  from  attaining  it.  The  loss  of  a  large 
part  of  his  private  fortune,  and  the  world's 
refusal  to  recognise  his  genius,  completed  what 
natural  temperament  had  begun;  and  it  only 
remained  for  the  philosophy  of  the  Upanishads  to 
give  a  theoretic  sanction  to  the  resulting  state 
of  mind  by  teaching  that  all  existence  is  in  itself 
an  evil — a  position  which  placed  him  in  still  more 
thoroughgoing  antagonism  to  Hegel. 

It  will  be  remembered  that  Kant's  criticism 
had  denied  the  human  mind  all  knowledge  of 
things  in  themselves,  and  that  the  post-Kantian 
systems  had  been  so  many  efforts  to  get  at  the 
Absolute  in  its  despite.  But  none  had  stated 
the  question  at  issue  so  clearly  as  Schopenhauer 
put  it,  or  answered  it  in  such  luminous  terms. 
Like  theirs,  his  solution  is  idealist;  but  the 
idealism  is  constructed  on  new  lines.  If  we 
know  nothing  else,  we  know  ourselves;  only 
it  has  to  be  ascertained  what  exactly  we  are. 
Hegel  said  that  the  essence  of  consciousness 
is  reason,  and  that  reason  is  the  very  stuff  of 
which  the  world  is  made.  No,  replies  Scho- 
penhauer, that  is  a  one-sided  scholastic  view. 
Much  the  most  important  part  of  ourselves 
is  not  reason,  but  that  very  unreasonable  thing 


The  German  Idealists  145 

called  will — that  aimless,  hopeless,  infinite,  in- 
satiable craving  which  is  the  source  of  all  our 
activity  and  of  all  our  misery  as  well.  This  is 
the  thing-in-itself ,  the  timeless,  inextended  entity 
behind  all  phenomena,  come  to  the  consciousness 
of  itself,  but  also  of  its  utter  futility,  in  man. 

The  cosmic  will  presents  itself  to  us  object- 
ively under  the  form  of  the  great  natural  forces 
— gravitation,  heat,  light,  electricity,  chemical 
affinity,  etc. ;  then  as  the  organising  power  of  life 
in  vegetables  and  animals;  finally  as  human 
self-consciousness  and  sociability.  These,  Scho- 
penhauer says,  are  what  is  really  meant  by  the 
Platonic  ideas,  and  they  figure  in  his  philosophy 
as  first  differentiations  of  the  primordial  will, 
coming  between  its  absolute  unity  and  the  in- 
dividualised objects  and  events  that  fill  all  space 
and  time.  It  is  the  function  of  architecture, 
plastic  art,  painting,  and  poetry  to  give  each  of 
these  dynamic  ideas,  singly  or  in  combination, 
its  adequate  interpretation  for  the  aesthetic 
sense.  One  art  alone  brings  us  a  direct  revela- 
tion of  the  real  world,  and  that  is  music.  Musi- 
cal compositions  have  the  power  to  express  not 
any  mere  ideal  embodiment  of  the  underlying 
will,  but  the  will  itself  in  all  its  majesty  and 
unending  tragic  despair. 

Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge  is  given 
in  the  essay  by  which  he  obtained  his  doctor's 
degree,  On  the  Four-fold  Root  of  the  Sufficient 


146  Modern  Philosophy 

Reason.  Notwithstanding  this  rather  alarming 
title,  it  is  a  singularly  clear  and  readable  work. 
The  standpoint  is  a  simplification  of  Kant's 
Critique.  The  objects  of  consciousness  offer 
themselves  to  the  thinking,  acting  subject  as 
grouped  presentations  in  which  there  is  "nothing 
sudden,  nothing  single/'  (i )  When  a  new  object 
appears  to  us,  it  must  have  a  cause,  physical, 
physiological,  or  psychological;  and  this  we  call 
the  reason  why  it  becomes.  (2)  Objects  are 
referred  to  concepts  of  more  or  less  generality, 
according  to  the  logical  rules  of  definition, 
classification,  and  inference;  that  is  the  reason 
of  their  being  known.  (3)  Objects  are  mathe- . 
matically  determined  by  their  position  relatively 
to  other  objects  in  space  and  time;  that  is  the 
reason  of  their  being.  (4)  Practical  objects  or 
ends  of  action  are  determined  by  motives;  the 
motive  is  the  reason  why  one  thing  rather  than 
another  is  done. 

The  last  "sufficient  reason"  takes  us  to  ethics. 
Schopenhauer  agrees  with  Kant  in  holding  that 
actions  considered  as  phenomena  are  strictly 
determined  by  motives,  so  much  so  that  a  com- 
plete knowledge  of  a  man's  character  and  envi- 
ronment would  enable  us  to  predict  his  whole 
course  of  conduct  through  life.  Nevertheless, 
each  man,  as  a  timeless  subject,  is  and  knows 
himself  to  be  free.  To  reconcile  these  apparently 
conflicting  positions  we  must  accept  Plato's 


The  German  Idealists  147 

theory  that  each  individual's  whole  fate  has  been 
determined  by  an  ante-natal  or  transcendental 
choice  for  which  he  always  continues  responsible. 
Nevertheless,  cases  of  religious  "conversion" 
and  the  like  prove  that  the  eternal  reality  of  the 
Will  occasionally  asserts  itself  in  radical  trans- 
formations of  character  and  conduct. 

In  ethics  Schopenhauer  distinguishes  between 
two  ideals  which  may  be  called  "relative"  and 
' '  absolute' '  good.  Relative  good  agrees  with  the 
standard  of  what  in  England  is  known  as 
Universalistic  Hedonism — the  greatest  pleasure 
combined  with  the  least  pain  for  all  sensitive 
beings,  each  agent  counting  for  no  more  than 
one.  Personally  passionate,  selfish,  and  brutal, 
Schopenhauer  still  had  a  righteous  abhorrence 
of  cruelty  to  animals;  whereas  Kant  had  no 
such  feeling.  But  positive  happiness  is  a  delu- 
sion, and  no  humanity  can  appreciably  diminish 
the  amount  of  pain  produced  by  vital  compe- 
tition— recognised  by  our  philosopher  before 
Darwin — in  the  world.  Therefore  Buddhism  is 
right,  and  the  higher  morality  bids  us  extirpate 
the  will-to-live  altogether  by  ascetic  practices 
and  meditation  on  the  universal  vanity  of 
things.  Suicide  is  not  allowed,  for  while  an- 
nihilating the  intelligence  it  would  not  exclude 
some  fresh  incarnation  of  the  will.  And  the  last 
dying  wish  of  Schopenhauer  was  that  the  end  of 
this  life  might  be  the  end  of  all  living  for  him. 


148  Modern  Philosophy 

Herbart 

J.  F.  Herbart  (1776-1841)  occupies  a  peculiar 
position  among  German  idealists.  Like  the 
others,  he  distinguishes  between  reality  and 
appearance;  and,  like  Schopenhauer  in  particu- 
lar, he  altogether  rejects  Hegel's  identification 
of  reality  with  reason.  But,  alone  amone 
post-Kantian  metaphysicians,  he  is  a  pluralist. 
According-  to  him,  things-in-themselves,  the 
eternal  existents  underlying  all  phenomena,  are 
not  one,  but  many.  So  far  his  philosophy 
is  a  return  to  the  pre- Kantian  system  of  Wolf 
and  Leibniz ;  but  whereas  the  monads  of  Leibniz 
were  credited  with  an  inward  principle  of  evo- 
lution carrying  them  for  ever  onward  through 
an  infinite  series  of  progressive  changes,  Herbart 
pushes  his  metaphysical  logic  to  the  length  of 
denying  all  change  and  all  movement  to  the 
eternal  entities  of  which  reality  is  made  up. 

Herbart  is  entitled  to  the  credit — whatever  it 
may  be  worth — of  devising  a  system  unlike 
every  other  in  history;  for  while  Hegel  has  a 
predecessor  in  Heracleitus,  his  rival  combines 
the  Eleatic  immobilism  with  a  pluralism  that 
is  all  his  own.  It  is  not,  however,  on  these 
paradoxes  that  his  reputation  rests,  but  on 
more  solid  services  as  a  psychologist  and  an 
educationalist.  Without  any  acquaintance,  as 
would  seem,  with  the  work  doing  in  Britain, 


The  German  Idealists  149 

Herbart  discarded  the  old  faculty  psychology, 
conceiving  mentality  as  made  up  of  "presenta- 
tions/* among  which  a  constant  competition 
for  the  field  of  consciousness  is  going  on ;  and  it 
is  to  this  view  that  such  terms  as  "  inhibition" 
and  "  threshold  of  consciousness"  are  due.  And 
the  enormous  prominence  now  given  to  the 
idea  of  value  in  ethics  may  be  traced  back  to 
the  teaching  of  a  thinker  whom  he  greatly 
influenced,  F.  E.  Beneke  (1798-1854). 


CHAPTER  V^ 

THE   HUMANISTS   OF    THE    NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

THE  philosophical  movement  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  afterthe-coilapse  of  Gefnran 
Jjdfiajism,  jfcas  not  been  dominated  by  any  single 
master  or  any  single  direction  to  anything  like 
the  same  extent  as  its  predecessors.  But  if  we 
are  called  on  to  select  the  dominant  note  by 
which  all  its  products  have  been  more  or  less 
coloured  and  characterised,  none  more  im- 
pressive than  the  note  of  Humanism  can  be 
named.  As  applied  to  the  culture  of  the 
Renaissance,  humanism  meant  a  tendency  to 
concentrate  interest  on  this  world  rather  than 
on  the  next,  using  classic  literature  as  the  best 
means  of  understanding  what  man  had  been 
and  again  might  be.  At  the  period  on  which  we 
are  entering  human  interests  again  become 
ascendant;  but  they  assume  the  widest  possible 
range,  claiming  for  their  dominion  the  whole  of 
experience — all  that  has  ever  been  done  or  known 
or  imagined  or  dreamed  or  felt.  Hegells^Jn^ 
ventory,  in  a  sense,  embraced  all  this ;  but  Hegel 
had  a  way  of  packing  his  trunk  that  sometimes 
150 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    151 


crushed  the 

way  of  opening  it  that  few  could  understand. 
Besides,  much  was  left  out  of  the  trunk  that 
could  ill  be  spared  by  mankind. 

Aristotle  has  well  said  that  the  soul  is  in  a 
way  everything  ;  and  as  such  its  analysis,  under 
the  name  of  psychology,  has  entered  largely  into 
the  philosophy  of  the  century.  Theory  of  know- 
ledge, together  with  logic,  has  figured  copiously 
in  academic  courses,  with  the  result  of  putting 
what  is  actually  known  before  the  student  in  a 
new  and  interesting  light;  but  with  the  result 
also  of  developing  so  much  pedantry  and  scep- 
ticism as  to  give  many  besides  dull  fools  the  im- 
pression that  divine  philosophy  is  both  crabbed 
and  harsh. 

The  French  Eclectics 

In  the  two  centuries  after  Descartes  France, 
so  great  in  scienqe,  history  and  literature,  had 
produced  no  original  philosopher,  although 
general  ideas  derived  from  English  thought  were 
extensively  circulated  for  the  purpose  of  dis- 
crediting the  old  order  in  Church  and  State. 
When  this  work  had  been  done  with  a  thorough- 
ness going  far  beyond  the  intention  of  the  first 
reformers  a  reaction  set  in,  and  the  demand 
arose  for  something  more  conservative  than  the 
so-called  sensualism  and  materialistic  atheism  of 


152  Modern  Philosophy 

the  pre-revolutionary  times.  A  certain  origin- 
ality and  speculative  disinterestedness  must  be 
allowed  to  Maine  de  Biran  (1766-1824),  who, 
some  years  after  Fichte — but,  as  would  seem, 
independently  of  him — referred  to  man's  vol- 
untary activity  as  a  source  of  a  priori  know- 
ledge. A  greater  immediate  impression  was 
produced  by  Royer-Collard  (1763-1845),  who, 
as  Professor  at  the  Sorbonne  in  1811,  im- 
ported the  common-sense  spiritualism  of  Reid 
(1710-1796)  as  an  antidote  to  the  then  reigning 
theories  of  Condillac  (1715-1780),  who,  im- 
proving on  Locke,  abolished  reflection  as  a 
distinct  source  of  our  ideas.  Then  came  Victor 
Cousin  (1792-1867),  a  brilliant  rhetorician,  and, 
after  Madame  de  Stael  the  first  to  popularise 
German  philosophy  in  France.  As  Professor 
at  the  Sorbonne,  in  the  last  years  of  the  Bour- 
bon monarchy,  he  distinctly  taught  a  pantheistic 
Absolutism  compounded  of  Schelling  and  Hegel ; 
but,  whether  from  conviction  or  opportunism, 
this  was  silently  withdrawn,  and  a  so-called 
eclectic  philosophy  put  in  its  place.  According 
to  Cousin,  in  all  countries  and  all  ages,  from 
ancient  India  to  modern  Europe,  speculation 
has  developed  under  the  four  contrasted  forms 
of  sensualism,  idealism,  scepticism,  and  mystic- 
ism. Each  is  true  in  what  it  asserts,  false  in 
what  it  denies,  and  the  right  method  is  to  pre- 
serve the  positive  while  rejecting  the  negative 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    153 

elements  of  all  four.  But  neither  the  master  nor 
his  disciples  have  ev«6r  consistently  answered  the 
vital  question,  wha£  those  elements  are. 

Hamilton  and  the  Philosophy  of  the  Conditioned 

Among  other  valuable  contributions  to  the 
history  of  philosophy,  Victor  Cousin  had  lectured 
very  agreeably  on  the  philosophy  of  Kant, 
accepting  the  master's  arguments  for  the  apri- 
orism  of  space  and  time,  but  rejecting  his  re- 
duction of  them  to  mere  subjective  forms  as 
against  common-sense.  He  had  not  gone  into 
Kant's  destructive  .criticism  of  all  metaphysics, 
and  this  was  now  to  be  turned  against  him  by  an 
unexpected  assailant.  Sir  William  Hamilton 
(1788-1856),  afterwards  widely  celebrated  as 
Professor  of  Logic  and  Metaphysics  at  Edin- 
burgh, began  his/  philosophical  career  by  an 
essay  on  "The  Philosophy  of  the  Conditioned"  in 
the  Edinburgh  Review  for  October,  1829,  con- 
troverting the  Absolutism  both  of  Cousin  and  of 
his  master,  Schelling.  The  reviewer  had  ac- 
quired some  not  very  accurate  knowledge  of 
Kant  in  Germany  ten  years  before ;  and  he  uses 
this,  with  •ther  rather  flimsy  erudition,  to 
establish  the  principle  that  to  think  is  to  condi- 
tion, and  that  therefore  the  Absolute  cannot  be 
thought — cannot  be  conceived.  Hamilton  en- 
joyed the  reputation  of  having  read  "all  that 


154  Modern  Philosophy 

mortal  man  had  ever  written  about  philosophy" ; 
but  this  evidently  did  not  include  Hegel,  who 
certainly  had  performed  the  feat  declared  to  be 
impossible.  Thirty  years  later  the  philosophy 
of  the  conditioned  attained  a  sudden  but 
transient  notoriety,  thanks  to  the  use  made  of 
it  by  Hamilton's  disciple,  H.  L.  Mansel,  in  his 
Bampton  Lectures  on  The  Limits  of  Religious 
Thought  (1858).  The  object  of  these  was  to 
prove  that,  as  we  know  nothing  about  Things- 
in- themselves,  nothing  told  about  God  in  the 
Bible  or  the  Creeds  can  be  rejected  a  priori  as 
incredible.  As  an  apology  the  book  failed 
utterly,  its  only  effect  being  to  prepare  public 
opinion  for  the  Agnosticism  of  Herbert  Spencer 
and  Huxley. 

Auguste  Comte 

The  brilliant  audiences  that  hung  spell-bound 
on  the  lips  of  Victor  Cousin  as  he  unrolled  be- 
fore them  the  Infinite,  the  Finite  and  the  relation 
between  the  two,  little  knew  that  France's  only 
great  philosopher  since  Descartes  was  working 
in  obscurity  among  them.  Auguste  Comte 
(1798-1857),  the  founder  of  Positivism,  be- 
longed to  a  Catholic  and  Legitimist  family.  By 
profession  a  mathematical  teacher,  he  fell 
early  under  the  influence  of  the  celebrated  St. 
Simon,  a  mystical  socialist  who  exercised  a 


AUGUSTE    COMTE 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    155 

powerful  attraction  on  others  besides  Comte. 
The  connection  lasted  four  years,  when  they 
quarrelled;  indeed,  Comte's  character  was  such 
as  to  make  permanent  co-operation  with  him 
impossible,  except  on  terms  of  absolute  agree- 
ment with  his  opinions  and  submission  to  his 
will.  At  a  subsequent  period  he  obtained  some 
fairly  well-paid  employment  at  the  Ecole 
Poly  technique,  but  lost  it  again  owing  to  the  in- 
jurious terms  in  which  he  spoke  of  his  col- 
leagues. In  his  later  years  he  lived  on  a  small 
annuity  made  up  by  contributions  from  his 
admirers. 

August e  Comte  disliked  and  despised  Plato, 
altogether  preferring  Aristotle  to  him  as  a 
philosopher ;  but  it  is  fundamentally  as  a  Platon- 
ist,  not  as  an  Aristotelian,  that  he  should 
himself  be  classed — in  this  sense,  that  he  valued 
knowledge  above  all  as  the  means  towards  recon- 
stituting society  on  the  basis  of  an  ideal  life. 
And  this  is  the  first  reason  why  fi*s  philosophy  is 
called  positive — to  distinguish  it  as  recon- 
structive from  the  purely  negative  thought  of  the 
Revolution.  The  second  reason  is  to  distinguish 
it  as  dealing  with  real  facts  from  the  figments  of 
theology  and  the  abstractions  of  metaphysics. 
Positive  science /explains  natural  events  neither 
by  the  intervention  of  supernatural  beings  nor 
by  the  mutual  relations  of  hypostasised  con- 
cepts, but  by  verifiable  laws  of  succession  and 


156     '  Modern  Philosophy 

resemblance.  Turgot  was  the  first  to  distinguish 
the  theological,  metaphysical,  and  mechanical 
interpretations  as  successive  stages  of  a  historical 
evolution  (1750);  Hume  was  the  first  to.  single 
out  the  relations  of  orderly  succession  and 
resemblance  as  the  esssential  elements  of  real 
knowledge  (1739);  Comte,  with  the  synthetic 
genius  of  the  nineteenth  century,  first  combined 
these  isolated  suggestions  with  a  wealth  of  other- 
vast  theory  of  human  progress  set 


out  in  the  fifth  and  sixth  volumes  of  his  Philo- 
sophic Positive  —  the  best  sketch  of  universal 
history  ever  written. 

The  positive  sciences  fall  into  two  great 
divisions  —  the  concrete,  dealing  with  the  actual 
phenomena  as  presented  in  space  and  time;  the 
abstract,  which  alone  concerns  philosophy,  deal- 
ing with  their  laws.  The  most  important  of  the 
abstract  sciences  is  Sociology,  claimed  by  Comte 
as  his  own  special  creation.  The  study  of  this 
demands  a  previous  knowledge  of  biology, 
psychology  being  dismissed  as  a  metaphysical 
delusion  «rtd-  phrefK>logy-43uk  on.  its-plage.  The 
science  of  life  pre-supposes  Chemistry,  before 
which  comes  Physics,  pre-supposing  Astronomy, 
and,  as  the  basis  of  all,  Mathematics  divided  into 
the  calculus  and  geometry.  At  a  later  period 
Morality  was  placed  as  a  seventh  fundamental 
science  at  the  head  of  the  whole  hierarchy. 

At  a  first  glance  ^ome  serious  flaws  reveal  .*.,-> 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    157 

.themselves  in  the  imposing  logic  of  this  scheme. 
Astronomy  as  a  concrete  science  ought  to  have 
been  excluded  from  the  series,  its  admission  be- 
ing apparently  due  to  the  historical  circumstance 
that  the  most  general  laws  of  physics  were 
ascertained  through  the  study  of  celestial  phe- 
nomena. But  on  the,  same  ground  geology  can 
no  longer  be  excluded,  as  its  records  led  to  the 
recognition  of  the  evolution  of  life;  or  should 
evolution  be  referred  to  the  concrete  sciences  of 
zoology  and  botany,  by  parity  of  reasoning 
human  progress  should  be  treated  as  a  branch 
of  universal  history — which,  in  fact,  is  what 
Comte  makes  it  in  his  fifth  and  sixth  volumes. 
It  would  have  been  better  had  he  also  studied 
social  statics  on  the  historical  method.  As  it  is, 
the  volume  in  which  the  conditions  of  social 
equilibrium  are  supposed  to  be  established 
contains  only  one  chapter  on  the  subject,  and 
that  is  very  meagre,  consisting  of  some  rather 
superficial  observations  on  family  life  and  the 
division  of  labour.  No.  doubt-  the  matter  re- 
ceives a  far  more  thorough  discussion  in  the 
author's  later  work,  Politique  Positive.  But  this 
merely  embodies  his  own  plan  of  reorganisation 
for  the  society  of  the  future,  and  therefore  should 
count  not  as  science,  but  as  art. 

!  ,  •     , 

The  Positivist  theory  of  social  dynamics  jr 
that  all  branches  of  knowledge  pass  through 
three  successive  stages  ak-ead^  described  as  the 


158  Modern  Philosophy 

theological,  the  metaphysical,  and  the  scientific. 
And  this  advance  is  accompanied  by  a  parallel 
evolution  on  the  governmental  side  from  the 
military  to  the  industrial  regime,  with  a  re- 
volutionary or  transitional  period  answering  to 
metaphysical  philosophy.  To  this  scheme  it 
might  be  objected  that  the  parallelism  is  merely 
accidental.  A  scientific  view  of  nature  and  a 
profound  knowledge  of  her  laws  is  no  doubt  far 
more  conducive  to  industry  than  a  superstitious 
view;  'but  it  is  also  more  favourable  to  the 
successful  prosecution  of  war,  which,  indeed, 
always  has  been  an  industry  like  another.  Nor, 
to  judge  by  modern  experience,  does  it  look  as  if 
a  government  placed  in  the  hands  of  a  country's 
chief  capitalists — which  was  what  Comte  pro- 
posed— would  be  less  militant  in  its  general 
disposition  than  the  parliamentary  governments 
which  he  condemns  as  "metaphysical."  In 
fact,  it  is  by  theologians  and  metaphysicians 
that  our  modern  horror  of  war  has  been  inspired 
rather  than  by  scientists. 

The  great  idea  of  Comte's  life,  that  the  positive 
sciences,  philosophically  systematised,  are  de- 
stined to  supply  the  basis  of  a  new  religion  sur- 
passing Catholicism  in  its  social  efficacy,  seems  a 
delusion  really  inherited  from  one  of  his  pet 
aversions,  Plato.  It  arose  from  a  profound  mis- 
conception of  what  Catholicism  had  done,  and  a 
misconception,  equally  profound,  of  the  means 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    159 

by  which  its  priesthood  worked.  In  spite  of 
Comte's  denials,  the  leverage  was  got  not  by 
appeals  to  the  heart,  but  by  appeals  to  that 
future  judgment  with  which  the  preaching  of 
righteousness  and  temperance  was  associated  by 
St.  Paul,  his  supposed  precursor  in  religion,  as 
Aristotle  was  his  precursor  in  philosophy. 

The  worship  of  Humanity,  or,  as  it  has  been 
better  called,  the  Service  of  Man,  is  a  great  and 
inspiring  thought.  Only  it  is  not  a  religion,  but 
a  metaphysical  idea,  derived  by  Comte  from  the 
philosophers  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  by 
them  through  imperial  Rome  from  the  Human- 
ists and  Stoics  of  ancient  Athens. 

J.  S.  Mill 

John  Stuart  Mill  (1806-1873)  was,  like  Comte, 
a  Platonist  in  the  sense  of  valuing  knowledge 
chiefly  as  an  instrument  of  social  reform.,/  He 
was  indeed  bred  up  by  his  father,  James  Mill 
(1773-1836),  and  by  Jeremy  Bentham  as  a 
prophet  of  the  new  Utilitarianism  as  Comte 
was,  to  some  extent,  trained  by  St.  Simon  to 
substitute  a  new  order  for  that  which  the  Revo- 
lution had  destroyed.  Mill,  however,  had 
been  educated  on  the  lines  of  Greek  liberty 
rather  than  in  the  tradition  of  Roman  authority; 
while  both  were  largely  affected  by  the  Roman- 
ticism current  in  their  youth.  The  worship  of 


160  Modern  Philosophy 

women,  revived  from  the  age  of  chivalry, 
entered  into  the  romantic  movement ;  and  it  may 
be  mentioned  in  this  connection  that  Mill  calls 
Mrs.  Taylor,  the  lady  with  whom  he  fell  in  love 
at  twenty-four  and  married  eighteen  years 
later,  "the  inspirer  and  in  part  the  author  of  all" 
that  was  best  in  his  writings;  while  Comte  re- 
fers his  religious  conversion  to  Madame  Clotilde 
Vaux,  the  object  of  his  adoration  in  middle  life. 
It  seems  probable,  however,  from  the  little  we 
know  of  Mrs.  Taylor — whom  Carlyle  credits 
with  "the  keenest  insight  and  the  royallest 
volition1' — that  her  influence  was  the  reverse  of 
Clotilde's.  If  anything,  she  attached  Mill  still 
more  firmly  to  the  cause  of  pure  reason. 

It  has  been  mentioned  how  Kant's  meta- 
physical agnosticism  was  played  out  by  Hamil- 
ton against  Cousin.  A  little  later  Whewell,  the 

Cambridge  historian   of   physical   science,   im- 
4  j>^X^rvi4-£*  /wlyxs*-*^~  r**~f  w*^,  JW"'4.  ^XJA^^tf^^Axt^  (^ 

pelted   Kant  s   theory    of   necessary   truth    in 

opposition  to  the  empiricism  of  popular  English 
thought,  and  Kant's  Categorical  Imperative  in 
still  more  express  contr§,dtction  to  Bentham's 
utilitarian  moralityTNow  Mill,  educated  as  he 
had  been  on  the  associationist  psychology  and 
in  the  central  line  of  the  English  epistemological 
tradition,  rejected  the  German  apriorism  as 
false  in  itself,  while  more  particularly  hating  it 
as,  in  his  opinion,  a  dangerous  enemy  to  all  social 
progress.  For  to  him  what  people  called  their 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    161 

intuitions,  whether  theoretic  or  practical,  were 
merely  the  time-honoured  prejudices  in  which 
they  had  been  brought  up,  and  the  contradictory 
of  which  they  could  not  conceive.  Comte 
similarly  interpreted  the  metaphysical  stage 
of  thought  as  the  erection  into  immutable 
principles  of  certain  abstract  ideas  whose  value — 
if  they  had  any — was  merely  relative  and 
provisional.  Mill,  with  his  knowledge  of  history, 
might  have  remembered  that  past  thought, 
beginning  with  Plato,  shows  no  such  connection 
between  intuitionism  and  immobility  or  re- 
action, while  such  experientialists  as  Hobbes 
and  Hume  have  been  political  Tories.  But  in  his 
own  time  the  a  priori  philosophy  went  hand  in 
hand  with  conservatism  in  Church  and  State,  so 
he  set  himself  to  explode  it  in  his  System  of  Logic 

(1843). 

Mill's  Logic,  the  most  important  English 
contribution  to  philosophy  since  Hume,  is  based 
on  Hume's  theory  of  knowledge,  amended  and 
supplemented  by  some  German  and  French 
ideas.  It  is  conceded  to  Kant  that  mathematical 
truths  are  synthetic,  not  analytic.  It  is  not 
jrVcontained  in  the  idea  of  two  and  two  that  they 
make  four,  nor  in  the  idea  of  two  straight  lines 
that  they  cannot  enclose  a  space.  Such  proposi- 
tions are  real  additions  to  our  knowledge;  but  it 
is  only  experience  that  justifies  us  in  accepting 
them.  What  constitutes  their  peculiar  certainty 


1 62  Modern  Philosophy 

is  that  they  can  be  verified  by  trial  on  imagined 
numbers  and  lines,  without  reference  to  external 
objects.  But  by  what  right  we  generalise  from 
mental  experience  to  all  experience  Mill  does 
not  explain.  Hume's  analysis  of  causation  into 
antecedence  and  sequence  of  phenomena  is 
accepted  by  Mill  as  it  was  accepted  by  Kant ; 
but  the  law  that  every  change  must  have  a  cause 
is  affirmed,  i*i  nrlVmpjrm  to  Dt^Th^mafi — Brown 
(1778-1820),  with  more  distinctness  than  by 
Hume.  -As-Laplace  put  it,  the  whole  present 
state  of  the  universe  is  a  product  of  its  whole 
preceding  state.  But  we  only  know  this  truth 
by  experience ;  and  we  can  conceive  a  state  of 
things  where  phenomena  succeed  one  another  by 
a  different  law  or  without  any  law  at  all.  Mill 
himself  was  ready  to  believe  that  causation  did 
not  obtain  at  some  very  remote  point  of  space ; 
though  what  difference  remoteness  could  make, 
except  we  suppose  it  to  be  causal-which  would 
be  a  reassertion  of  the  law — he  does  not  explain ; 
nor  yet  what  warrant  we  have  for  assuming 
that  causation  holds  through  all  time,  or  at 
any  future  moment  of  time. 

Next  to  the  law  of  universal  causation  in- 
ductive science  rests  on  the  doctrine  of  natu- 
ral kinds.  The  material  universe  is  known  to 
consist  of  a  number  of  substances — namely, 
the  chemical  elements  and  their  combinations, 
so  constituted  that  a  certain  set  of  character- 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    163 

istic  properties  are  invariably  associated  with  an 
indefinite  number  of  other  properties.  Thus,  if 
in  a  strange  country  a  certain  mineral  answers 
the  usual  tests  for  arsenic ,  we  know  that  a  given 
dose  of  it  will \destroy  life;  and  we  are  equally 
certain  that  if  the  spectroscopic  examination 
of  a  new  star  shows  the  characteristic  lines  of 
iron,  a  metal  possessing  all  the  properties  of  iron 
as  we  find  it  in  our  mines  is  present  in  that 
distant  luminary.  According  to  Mill,  we  are 
justified  in  drawing  that  sweeping  inference  on 
the  strength  of  a  single  well-authenticated  ob- 
servation, because  we  know  by  innumerable 
observations  on  terrestrial  substances  that 
natural  kinds  possessing  such  index  qualities  do 
exist,  whereas  there  is  riot  a  single  instance  of 
a  substance  possessing  those  qualities  without 
the  rest. 

For  Mill,  a&4oaLHiy£ie,  reality  means  states  of 
consciousness  and  the  relations  between  them. 
Matter  he  defines  as  a  permanent  possibility  of 
sensation;  mind  as  a  permanent  possibility  of 
thought  and  feeling.  But  tne  latter  definition  is 
adm&tedly  not  satisfactory,  for  a  stream  of 
thoughts  and  feelings  which  is  proved  by  mem- 
ory to  have  the  consciousness  of  itself  seems  to 
be  something  more  than  a  mere  stream.  All 
explanations  must  ericl'm  an  ultimate  inex- 
plicability.,  Ged-^ftay^be-conceived  as  a  series 
~e£,.  thoughts  and  feelings  prolonged  through 


164  Modern  Philosophy 

eternity;  and  it  is  a  logically  defensible  hypo- 
thesis that  the  order  of  nature  was  designed  by 
such  a  beirig,  although  the  amount  of  suffering 
endured  /by  living  creatures  excludes  the  notion 
of  a  Creator  at  once  beneficent  and  omnipotent. 
And  /if  the  Darwinian  theory  were  established, 
the  £ase  for  a  designing  intelligence  would  col- 
lapse. Personally  Mill  believed  neither  in  a 
Qfod  nor  in  a  future  life. 

'  In  morals  Mill  ma^-ba*  considered  the  creator 
of  what  Henry  Sidgwick,  in  his  Methods  of  Ethics 
(1874),  called  Universalistic  Hedonism.  The 
English  moralists  of  the  eighteenth  century  had 
set  up  the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest 
number  as  the  ideal  end  of  action;  but  they  did 
not  hold  that  each  individual  could  be  expected 
to  pursue  anything  but  his  own  happiness;  the 
object  of  Bentham  (1748-1832)  being  to  make 
the  two  coincide.  Kant  showed  that  the  rule  of 
right  excluded  any  such  accommodation,  and  a 
crisis  in  his  own  life  led  Mill  to  adopt^  the  same 
conclusion.  Afterwards  he  rather  confused  the 
issues  by  distinguishing  between  higher  and 
lower  pleasures,  leaving  experts  to  decide  which 
were  the  pleasures  to  be  preferred."  The  uni- 
versalistic  standard  settles  the  question  sum- 
marily by  estimating  pleasures  according  to 
their  social  utility/ 

Mill  fully  sympathised  with  Comte's  demand 
for  social  reorganisation  as  a  means  towards  the 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    165 

moral  end.  But,  with  his  English  and  Protestant 
traditions,  he  had  no  faith  in  the  creation  of  a 
new  spiritual  power  with  an  elaborate  religious 
code  and  ritual  as  the  best  machinery  for  the 
purpose.  In  his  opinion,  the  claims  of  the  in- 
dividual to  extended  liberty  of  thought  and 
action,  not  their\restriction,  were  what  first 
needed  attention.  Second  to  this — if  second 
at  all — came  the  necessity  for  reforming  re- 
presentative government  on  the  lines  of  an 
enlarged  franchise  and  a  readjusted  electoral 
system  with  plural  suffrage  determined  by 
merit,  votes  for  women,  and  a  contrivance 
for  giving  minorities  a  weight  proportioned 
to  their  numbers.  The  problem  of  poverty 
was  to  be  dealt  with  by  restrictions  on  the 
increase  of  population  and  on  the  amount 
of  inheritable  property,  the  maximum  of 
which  ought  not  to  exceed  a  modest  compe- 
tence. > — -  , 

Among  the  noble  characters  presented  by  the 
history  of  philosopny  we  niay  distinguish  be- 
tween the  heroic  amd  the  saintly  types.  To  the 
former  in  modern  times  belong  Giordano  Bruno, 
Fichte,  and  to  some  extend  Comte ;  to  the  latter, 
Spinoza,  Berkeley,  and  Kant.  T<i  the  second 
class  we  may  sureljy  add  John  Stuar :  Mill,  whom 
Gladstone  called  '[the  saint  of  rationalism,"  and 
of  whom  August^  Laugal  said,  '  He  was  not 
sincere — he  was  sincerity  itself." 


1 66  Modern  Philosophy 

Herbert  Spencer 

Herbert  Spencer  (1820-1903)  was  the  son  of  a 

Nonconformist  country  schoolmaster,  but  was 
educated  chiefly  by  his  uncle  Thomas,  an 
Evangelical  clergyman  of  the  Church  of  England. 
A  radical  reformer  of  the  old  school,  Thomas 
vSpencer  seems  to  have  indoctrinated  his  youthful 
charge  with  the  germinal  principles  afterwards 
generalised  into  a  whole  cosmic  philosophy.  He 
had  a  passion  for  justice  realised  under  the  form 
of  liberty,  individual  responsibility,  and  self- 
help.  In  his  opinion,  until  it  was  modified  by 
private  misfortunes,  everything  served  every- 
body right.  Beginning  as  an  economical  admin- 
istrator of  the  new  Poor  Law,  he  at  last  became 
an  advocate  of  its  total  abolition;  and,  alone 
among  fifteen  thousand  clergymen,  he  was  an 
active  member  of  the  Anti-Corn  Law  League, 
besides  supporting  the  separation  of  Church  and 
State.  At  twenty-two  Herbert  Spencer  accepted 
and  summed  up  this  policy  under  the  form  of  a 
general  hostility  to  State  interference  with  in- 
dividual liberty,  supporting  it  by  a  reference  to 
the  reign  of  Natural  Law  in  all  orders  of  exist- 
ence. In  his  first  great  work,  Social  Statics,  the 
principle  of  laissez-faire  received  its  full  sys- 
tematic development  as  the  restriction  of  State 
action  to  the  defence  of  liberty  against  internal 
and  external  aggression,  the  raising  of  taxes  for 


HERBERT  SPENCER 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century   167 

any  other  purpose  being  unjust,  as  is  also 
private  ownership  of  land,  which  is  by  nature 
the  common  heritage  of  all.  Spencer  subse- 
quently came  to  abandon  land  nationalisa- 
tion, probably  from  alarm  at  its  socialistic 
implications. 

The  doctrine  of  natural  law  and  liberty  carried 
with  it  for  Spencer  a  strong  repugnance  not  only 
to  protectionism  in  politics,  but  also  to  miracles 
in  theology.  The  profession  of  journalism 
brought  him  into  touch  with  a  freethinking  set 
in  London.  Whether  under  their  influence,  or 
Shelley's,  or  by  some  spontaneous  process,  his 
religious  convictions  evaporated  by  twenty- 
eight  into  the  agnosticism  which  thenceforth 
remained  their  permanent  expression.  There 
might  or  not  be  a  First  Cause;  if  there  was,  we 
know  nothing  about  it.  At  this  stage  Lyell's 
attempted  refutation  of  Lamarck  converted 
Spencer  to  the  belief  in  man's  derivation  from 
some  lower  animal  by  a  process  of  gradual 
adaptation.  Thus  the  scion  of  an  education- 
alist family  came  to  interpret  the  whole  history 
of  life  on  our  planet  as  an  educative  process. 

It  seemed,  however,  as  if  there  was  one 
fatal  exception  to  the  scheme  of  naturalistic 
optimism.  The  Rev.  Thomas  Malthus  had 
originally  published  his  Essay  on  Population 
(1798)  as  a  telling  answer  to  the  "infidel" 
Godwin's  Political  Justice  (1793),  the  bolder 


1 68  Modern  Philosophy 

precursor  of  Social  Statics.  The  argument  was 
that  the  tendency  of  population  to  outrun  the 
means  of  subsistence  put  human  perfectibility 
out  of  the  question.  It  had  been  suggested  by 
the  idealists,  Mill  among  the  number,  that  the 
difficulty  might  be  obviated  by  habitual  self- 
restraint  on  the  part  of  married  people.  But 
Spencer,  with  great  ingenuity,  made  the  difficulty 
its  own  solution.  The  pressure  of  population  on 
the  means  of  subsistence  is  the  source  of  all 
progress;  and  of  progress  not  only  in  discoveries 
and  inventions,  but  also,  through  its  increased 
exercise,  in  the  instrument  which  affects  them — 
that  is,  the  human  brain.  Now,  it  is  a  principle 
of  Aristotle's,  revived  by  modern  biology,  that 
individuation  is  antagonistic  to  reproduction; 
and  increasing  individuation  is  the  very  law  of 
developing  life,  shown  above  all  in  the  grow- 
ing power  of  life's  chief  instrument,  which  is 
thought's  organ,  the  brain.  For,  as  Spencer 
proceeded  to  show  in  his  next  work,  the  Princi- 
ples of  Psychology,  life  means  a  continuous  series 
of  adjustments  of  internal  to  external  relations. 
Therefore  the  rate  of  multiplication  must  go  on 
falling  with  the  growth  of  intellectual  and  moral 
power  until  it  only  just  suffices  to  balance  the 
loss  by  death.  The  next  step  was  to  revive 
Laplace's  nebular  hypothesis,  and  to  connect 
it  through  Lyell's  uniformitarian  geology  with 
Lamarck's  developmental  biology,  thereby  ex- 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    169 

tending  the  same  evolutionary  process  through 
the  whole  history  of  the  universe. 

Nor  was  this  all.  Milne-Edwards,  by  another 
return  to  Aristotle,  had  pointed  to  the  ''physio- 
logical division  of  labour"  as  a  mark  of  ascend- 
ing organic  perfection,  to  which  Spencer  adds 
integration  of  structure  as  its  obverse  side,  at 
the  same  time  extending  the  world-law,  already 
made  familiar  in  part  through  its  industrial 
applications  by  Adam  Smith,  to  all  orders  of 
social  activity.  Finally,  differentiation  and 
integration  were  stretched  back  from  living  to 
lifeless  matter,  thus  bringing  astronomy  and 
geology,  which  had  already  entered  into  the 
causal  series  of  cosmic  transformations,  under 
one  common  law  of  evolution ;  while  at  the  same 
time,  seeing  it  to  be  generally  admitted  that 
inorganic  changes  originated  from  the  operation 
of  purely  mechanical  forces,  they  suggested  that 
mechanism,  without  teleology,  could  adequately 
explain  organic  evolution  also. 

Finally  came  the  great  discovery  of  Darwin 
and  Wallace,  with  its  extension  of  Malthus's  law 
to  the  whole  world  of  living  things.  Spencer  had 
just  touched,  without  grasping,  the  same  idea 
years  before.  He  now  gladly  accepted  Natural 
Selection  as  supplementing  without  superseding 
Lamarck's  theory  of  spontaneous  adaptation. 

To  complete  even  in  outline  the  vast  sweep  of 
projected  Synthetic  Philosophy  two  steps  more 


170  Modern  Philosophy 

remained  for  Spencer  to  take.  The  law  of 
evolution  had  to  be  brought  under  the  recently- 
discovered  law  of  the  Conservation  of  Energy, 
or,  as  he  called  it,  the  Persistence  of  Force,  and 
the  whole  of  unified  science  had  to  be  reconciled 
with  religion.  The  first  problem  was  solved  by 
interpreting  evolution  as  a  redistribution  of 
matter  and  motion — a  process  in  which,  of  course, 
energy  is  neither  lost  nor  gained.  The  second 
problem  was  solved  by  reducing  faith  and  know- 
ledge to  the  common  denominator  of  Agnosti- 
cism— a  method  that  found  more  favour  with 
Positivists  (in  the  wide  sense)  than  with  Christian 
believers. 

Herbert  Spencer  was  disappointed  to  find  that 
people. took  more  interest  in  the  portico  (as  he 
called  it  in  a  letter  to  the  present  writer) — that 
is  to  say,  the  metaphysical  introduction  to  his 
philosophical  edifice — than  in  its  interior.  He 
probably  had  some  suspicion  that  the  portico  was 
mere  lath  and  plaster,  while  he  felt  sure  that 
the  columns  and.  architraves  behind  it  were  of 
granite.  The  public,  however,  besides  their 
perennial  interest  in  religion,  might  be  excused 
for  giving  more  attention  to  even  a  baroque 
exterior  with  some  novelty  about  it  than  to  the 
formalised  eclecticism  of  what  stood  behind  it. 
Unfortunately,  they  soon  found  that  the  alleged 
reconciliation  was  a  palpable  sham.  Religion 
is  nothing  if  not  a  revelation,  and  an  unknowable 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    171 

God  is  no  God  at  all.  Even  the  pretended 
proofs  of  that  poor  residual  deity  involved  their 
author  in  the  transparent  self-contradiction  of 
calling  the  universe  the  manifestation  of  an 
Unknowable  Power.  Then  the  relations  be- 
tween this  Power  (such  as  it  was)  and  the  Energy 
(or  Force)  whose  conservation  (or  persistence) 
was  the  very  first  of  First  Principles  seemed 
hard  to  adjust.  Either  energy  is  created,  or  it 
is  not.  In  the  one  case,  what  becomes  of  its 
eternity?  in  the  other  case,  what  need  is  there  to 
assume  a  Power  (knowable  or  not)  behind  it? 
Science  will  not  shrink  back  before  such  a 
phantom,  nor  will  Religion  adore  it. 

Such  faulty  building  in  the  portico  prepares 
us  for  somewhat  unsteady  masonry  within;  and 
in  fact  none  holds  together  except  what  has  been 
transported  bodily  from  other  temples.  In 
the  past  history  of  the  universe,  considered  as 
a  "rearrangement  of  matter  and  motion,"  dis- 
integration and  assimilation  play  quite  as  great 
a  part  as  integration  and  differentiation.  Such 
formulas  have  no  advantage  over  the  metaphy- 
sical systematisation  of  Aristotle,  and  they 
give  us  as  little  power  either  to  predict  or  to 
direct.  Will  war  be  abolished  at  some  future 
time,  or  property  equalised  or  abolished,  or  mo- 
rality exalted,  or  religion  superseded?  Spencer 
was  ready  with  his  answer-;  but  the  law  of 
evolution  could  not  prove  it  true.  Neverthe- 


172  Modern  Philosophy 

less,  his  name  will  long  be  associated  with  evo- 
lution as  a  world-wide  process,  though  neither 
in  the  way  of  original  discovery  nor  of  complete 
generalisation,  and  far  less  of  successful  applica- 
tion to  modern  problems;  but  rather  of  diffu- 
sion and  popularisation,  even  as  other  valuable 
ideas  have  been  impressed  on  the  public  mind 
by  other  philosophies  at  a  vast  expense  of  in- 
genuity, knowledge,  and  labour,  but  not  at 
greater  expense  than  the  eventual  gain  has 
been  worth. 

The  English  Hegelians 

Hegel's  philosophy  first  drew  attention  in 
England  through  its  supposed  connection  with 
Strauss's  mythic  theory  of  the  Gospels  and 
Baur's  theory  of  New  Testament  literature  as  a 
product  of  party  conflicts  and  compromises  in 
the  primitive  Church.  Rightly  interpreted  as  a 
system  of  Pantheism,  it  was  decried  and  ridi- 
culed by  orthodox  theologians  in  the  name  of 
religion  and  common-sense,  while  cherished  by 
the  advanced  Broad  Church  as  a  means  of 
symbolising  away  the  creeds  they  continued  to 
repeat.  Then  the  triumph  of  Spencer's  Agnostic- 
ism in  the  middle  Victorian  period  (1864-1874) 
suggested  an  appeal  to  a  logic  whose  object  had 
been  to  resolve  the  negations  of  eighteenth- 
century  enlightenment  in  the  synthesis  of  a 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    173 

higher  unity.  The  first  pronunciation  in  this 
sense  was  The  Secret  of  Hegel  (1865),  by  Dr. 
Hutchison  Stirling  (1820-1909),  a  writer  of 
geniality  and  genuis,  who,  writing  from  the 
Hegelian  standpoint,  tried  to  represent  the 
English  rationalists  of  the  day  as  a  superficial 
and  retrograde  school.  It  was  a  bold  but  un- 
successful attempt  to  plant  the  banner  of  the 
Hegelian  Right  on  British  soil.  By  attacking 
Darwinism  Stirling  put  himself  out  of  touch 
with  the  general  movement  of  thought.  Pro- 
fessor William  Wallace  (18441-897),  John  Caird 
(1820-1898),  and  his  brother  Edward  Caird 
(1835-1908)  inclined  more  or  less  to  the  Left,  as 
also  does  Lord  Haldane  (b.  1865)  in  his  Gifford 
Lectures  (1903) ;  and  all  have  the  advantage  over 
Stirling  of  writing  in  a  clearer  if  less  picturesque 
style. 

T.  H.  Green  (1836-1882)  is  sometimes  quoted 
as  a  Hegelian,  but  his  intellectual  affinities  were 
rather  with  Fichte.  According  to  him,  reality 
is  the  thought  of  an  Eternal  Consciousness,  of 
which  personality  need  not  be  predicated,  while 
the  endless  duration  of  personal  spirits  seems  to 
be  denied.  Another  idealist,  F.  H.  Bradley 
(b.  1846) — perhaps  the  greatest  living  English 
thinker — develops  in  his  Appearance  and  Reality 
(1893)  a  metaphysical  system  which,  though 
Absolutist  in  form,  is,  to  me  at  least,  in  sub- 
stance practically  indistinguishable  from  the 


174  Modern  Philosophy 

dogmatic  Agnosticism  of  Herbert  Spencer, 
and  even  more  destructive  of  the  popular 
Theism.  Finally,  the  writings  of  Dr.  J.  E. 
McTaggart  (b.  1866),  teaching  as  they  do  a 
doctrine  of  developmental  personal  immortality 
without  a  God,  show  a  tendency  to  combine 
Hegel  with  Lotze. 

The  German  Eclectics 

By  general  consent  the  most  serious  and  in- 
fluential of  German  systematic  thinkers  since 
Hegel  is  R.  H.  Lotze  (1817-1881).  His  philoso- 
phy is  built  up  of  materials  derived  in  varying 
proportions  from  all  his  German  predecessors,  the 
most  distinctive  idea  being  pluralism,  probably 
suggested  in  the  first  instance  by  Herbart,  whom 
he  succeeded  as  Professor  at  Gottingen.  But 
Lotze  discards  the  rigid  monads  of  his  master 
for  the  more  intelligible  soul-substances  of 
Leibniz — or  rather  of  Bruno — whose  example 
he  also  follows  in  his  attempt  to  combine  plural- 
ism with  monism.  Very  strenuous  efforts  are 
made  to  give  the  unifying  principle  the  char- 
acter of  a  personal  God ;  but  the  suspicion  of  a 
leaning  to  Pantheism  is  not  altogether  eluded. 

More  original  and  far  more  uncompromising 
is  the  work  of  Ed.  v.  Hartmann  (1842-1906). 
Personally  he  enjoyed  the  twofold  distinction — 
whatever  it  may  be  worth — of  having  served  as 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    175 

an  officer  for  a  short  time  in  the  Prussian  army, 
and  of  never  having  taught  in  a  university.  His 
great  work,  published  at  twenty-seven,  appeared 
under  the  telling  title  of  the  Philosophy  of  the  Un- 
conscious. It  won  immediate  popularity,  and 
reached  its  eleventh  edition  in  1904.  Hartmann 
adopts,  with  some  slight  attenuation,  Scho- 
penhauer's pessimism,  and  his  metaphysics  with 
a  considerable  emendation.  In  this  new  version 
the  world  is  still  conceived  as  Will  and  Repre- 
sentation; but  whereas  for  Schopenhauer  the 
intellective  side  had  been  subordinated  to  the 
volitional,  with  Hartmann  the  two  are  co-equal 
and  intimately  united,  together  forming  that 
"Unconscious"  which  is  the  new  Absolute.  In 
this  way  Reason  again  becomes,  what  it  had 
been  with  Hegel,  a  great  cosmic  principle;  only, 
as  the  optimistic  universe  had  argued  itself  into 
existence,  so,  conversely,  the  pessimistic  universe 
has  to  argue  itself  out  of  existence.  As  in  the 
process  of  developing  differentiation,  the  voli- 
tional and  intellective  sides  draw  apart,  the 
Unconscious  becomes  self-conscious,  and  thus 
awakens  to  the  terrible  mistake  it  committed  in 
willing  to  be.  Thenceforth  the  whole  of  evolution 
is  determined  by  the  master- thought  of  how  not 
to  be.  The  problem  is  how  to  annul  the  creative 
Will.  And  the  solution  is  to  divide  it  into  two 
halves  so  opposed  that  the  one  shall  be  the  ne- 
gation and  destruction  of  the  other.  There  will 


176  Modern  Philosophy 

be  then,  not  indeed  a  certainty,  but  an  equal 
chance  of  definitive  self-annihilation  and  eternal 
repose.  Thus,  the  immediate  duty  for  mankind, 
as  also  their  predestined  task,  is  the  furtherance 
of  scientific  and  industrial  progress  as  a  means 
towards  this  consummation,  which  is  likewise 
their  predestined  end.  A  religious  colouring  is 
given  to  the  process  by  representing  it  as  an  in- 
verted Christian  scheme  in  which  man  figures  as 
theredeemerof  God — i.e., the  Absolute — from  the 
unspeakable  torments  to  which  he  is  now  con- 
demned by  the  impossibility  of  satisfying  his  will. 
Like  Hartmann,  Friedrich  Nietzsche  (1844- 
1900),  the  greatest  writer  of  modern  Germany, 
took  his  start  from  Schopenhauer,  but  broke  with 
pessimism  at  an  early  date,  having  come  to  dis- 
believe in  the  hedonism  on  which  it  is  founded. 
His  restless  vanity  drove  him  to  improve  on 
Darwinism  by  interpreting  evolution  as  the 
means  towards  creating  what  he  called  the 
Superman — that  is,  a  race  as  much  superior  to  us 
as  we  are  to  the  apes.  Progress,  however,  is 
not  to  be  in  the  direction  of  a  higher  morality, 
but  of  greater  power — the  Will-to-Power,  not 
the  Will-to-Live,  being  the  essence  of  what  is. 
Later  in  life  Nietzsche  revived  the  Stoic  doc- 
trine that  events  move,  and  have  moved  through 
all  time,  in  a  series  of  recurring  cycles,  each  being 
the  exact  repetition  of  its  predecessor.  It  is  a 
worthless  idea,  and  Nietzsche,  who  had  been  a 


The  Humanists  of  the  19th  Century    177 

Greek  professor,  must  have  known  where  he  got 
it ;  but  the  megalomania  to  which  he  eventually 
succumbed  prevented  his  recognising  the  debt. 
By  a  merited  irony  of  fate  this  worshipper  of 
the  Napoleonic  type  will  survive  only  as  a 
literary  moralist  in  the  history  of  thought. 

The  modern  revolt  against  metaphysical 
systemisation,  with  or  without  a  theological 
colouring,  took  in  Germany  the  form  of  two 
distinct  philosophical  currents.  The  first  is 
scientific  materialism,  or,  as  some  of  its  advocates 
prefer  to  call  it,  energism.  This  began  about 
1850,  but  boasts  two  great  living  representatives, 
the  biologist  Haeckel  and  the  chemist  Ostwald. 
In  their  practical  aims  these  men  are  idealists; 
but  their  admission  of  space  and  time  as  objec- 
tive realities  beyond  which  there  is  nothing,  and 
their  repudiation  of  agnosticism,  distinguish 
them  from  the  French  and  English  Positivists. 
The  other  and  more  powerful  school  is  known 
as  Neo-Kantianism.  It  numbers  numerous 
adherents  in  the  German  universities,  and  also 
in  those  of  France  and  Italy,  representing 
various  shades  of  opinion  united  by  a  common 
reference  to  Kant's  first  Critique,  dissociated 
from  its  concessions  to  deism,  as  the  true 
starting-point  of  modern  thought. 

The  Latest  Development 

Since  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth  century 


1 78  Modern  Philosophy 

the  interest  in  philosophy  and  the  ability  devoted 
to  its  cultivation  have  shown  no  sign  of  diminu- 
tion. Two  new  doctrines  in  particular  have 
become  subjects  of  world-wide  discussion.  I 
refer  to  the  theory  of  knowledge  called  Prag- 
matism, and  to  the  metaphysics  of  Professor 
Henri  Bergson.  Both  are  of  so  revolutionary, 
so  contentious,  and  so  elusive  a  character  as 
to  preclude  any  discussion  or  even  outline  of 
the  new  solutions  for  old  problems  which  they 
claim  to  provide.  But  I  would  recommend 
the  study  of  both,  and  especially  of  Bergson,  to 
all  who  imagine  that  the  possibilities  of  specu- 
lation are  exhausted,  or  that  we  are  any  nearer 
finality  and  agreement  than  when  Heracleitus 
first  glorified  war  as  the  father  of  all  things,  and 
contradiction  as  the  central  spring  of  life. 


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Kuno  Fischer.  Geschichte  der  neuern  Philo- 
sophic. Nine  vols.  Fourth  ed.  Heidelberg, 
1897-1904.  (Comes  down  to  Schopenhauer.) 

Erdmann.  Geschichte  der  Philosophic.  Vol. 
ii.  Fourth  ed.  Berlin,  1896.  (Comes  down  to 
Lotze;  third  ed.,  trans,  by  W.  S.  Hough;  London, 
1889.) 

Windelband.  Geschichte  der  neuern  Philo- 
sophic. Two  vols.  Fifth  ed.  (Comes  down 
to  Herbart  and  Beneke.  There  is  an  English 
trans,  of  Windelband's  General  History  of  Philo- 
sophy, by  J.  H.  Tufts,  New  York,  1893.  In 
his  contribution  to  the  General  History  of  Philo- 
sophy in  the  Kultur  der  Gegenwart,  Berlin,  1909, 
Windelband  includes  a  brief  but  useful  summary 
of  Pragmatism  and  Bergson.) 

Levy-Bruhl.  History  of  Modern  Philosophy 
in  France.  Trans,  by  Miss  Coblence.  London, 
1890. 

Forsyth,  T.  M.  English  Philosophy:  A  Study  of 
its  Methods  and  General  Development.  London, 
1910. 

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Giordano  Bruno.  Opere  Italiane.  Ed.  P. 
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Opera   latine   conscripta.       Naples    and 

Florence,  1879-91. 

Mclntyre,  J.  L.  Life  of  Giordano  Bruno. 
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Bacon,  Francis.  Works  and  Life.  Ed.  by 
Ellis  and  Spedding.  Fourteen  vols.  1864-74. 

Works.     One  vol.     Ed.  by  Ellis,  Sped- 
ding, and  Robertson.     — Novum  Organum.   Ed. 
by  T.  Fowler.     Oxford,  1878. 

Abbott,  Edwin.   Francis  Bacon.  London,  1885. 

Church,  R.  W.  Bacon  (English  Men  of  Let- 
ters). London,  1889. 

Hobbes,  Thomas.  Works,  English\and\Latin. 
Ed.  Sir  Wm.  Molesworth.  Sixteen  vols.  Lon- 
don, 1839-45. 

Robertson,  G.  C.  Hobbes.  London,  1886 
(Blackwood's  Philosophical  Classics). 

Stephen,  Sir  Leslie.  Hobbes.  London,  1903 
(English  Men  of  Letters). 

English  Thought  in  the  Eighteenth  Century. 

Second  ed.,  two  vols.  London,  1881. 

The    English    Utilitarians.     Three  vols. 

London,  1900. 

Descartes.  CEuvres.  Ed.  V.  Cousin.  Eleven 
vols.  Paris,  1824-1828.  A  new  edition  is  in 
course  of  publication. — English  trans,  of  the 
Method  and  the  Meditations  in  the  Scott  Library. 
London,  1901. 


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Descartes.  Life,  by  Elizabeth  Haldane. 
London,  1905. 

Malebranche.  (Euvres.  Three  vols.  Ed. 
Jules  Simon.  Paris,  1871. 

Spinoza.  Opera.  Ed.  Van  Vloten  and  Land. 
Two  vols.  The  Hague,  1882-83. 

—  Life  and  Philosophy.    By  Sir  Fr.  Pollock. 
London,  1880;  second  ed.,  1899. 

A   Study   of.     By    James     Martineau. 

London,  1883. 

-  's    Ethics,    A    Study    of.       By    H.    H. 
Joachim.     Oxford,  1901. 

—  Trans,  of  his  principal  works.     By  Elwes 
in  Bonn's  Library.     Two  vols.   1883-86.     Also 
Everyman's  Library. 

Ethics.  Trans,  by  Hale  White,  revised 

by  Amelia  Stirling.  London,  1899. 

Leben  und  Lehre.  By  J.  Frendenthal. 

1904. 

Leibniz.  Philosophische  Schriften.  Seven 
vols.  Ed.  C.  J.  Gerhardt.  Berlin,  1875-90. 

The  Philosophy  of  Leibniz .  B  y  B  ertrand 

Russell.  Cambridge,  1900. 

Locke,  John.  Works.  Nine  vols.  London, 
1824. 

Essay  Concerning  Human    Understand- 
ing.    Two  vols.;  in  Bonn's   Library.     London, 
1877. 

— i —  Life  of.  By  Fox  Bourne.  Two  vols. 
London,  1876. 


1 82  Bibliography 

Locke,  John.  By  Thomas  Fowler.  London, 
1880  (English  Men  of  Letters). 

By  Prof.  A.  C.  Fraser;  in  Blackwood's 

Phil.  Classics.     1890. 

Berkeley,  George.  Works  and  Life.  Ed.  A. 
C.  Fraser.  Four  vols.  Oxford,  1871. 

-By     Fraser      (Philosophical     Classics). 
1881. 

Hume,  David.  Philosophical  Works.  Four 
vols.  Ed.  Green  and  Grose.  London,  1874-75. 

-  By   T.    H.    Huxley     (English    Men    of 
Letters).     New  edition.     London,  1894. 

Kant.  Werke.  Ed.  Rosenkranz  and  Schubert. 
Twelve  vols.  1838-40.  Two  new  editions,  in- 
cluding the  correspondence,  are  now  in  course  of 
publication  at  Berlin.  There  are  English  trans- 
lations of  all  the  principal  works. 

-  Life  and  Doctrine.    By  F.  Paulsen;  trans. 
by  Cr  eight  on  and  Lefevre.     London,  1908. 

Fichte,  J.  G.  Werke.  Eleven  vols.  1834-46. 
Trans,  of  his  more  popular  works  by  Dr.  W. 
Smith.  Two  vols.  London,  1890. 

Adamson.  Fichte.  In  Blackwood's  Phil. 
Classics.  1901. 

Schelling,  F.  W.  J.  Werke.  Fourteen  vols. 
Stuttgart,  1856-61. 

Watson,  Prof.  J.  Schdting's  Transcendental 
Idealism.  Chicago,  1882. 

Hegel,  G.  W.  F.  Werke.  Nineteen  vols. 
in  twenty-one.  Leipzig,  1832-87. 


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Hegel.  By  Prof.  E.  Caird  (Philosophical 
Classics  for  English  Readers).  Edinburgh, 
1883.  Hegel's  Philosophies  of  Law,  Religion, 
History,  Mind,  his  History  of  Philosophy,  and 
the  smaller  Logic,  have  been  translated  into 
English. 

Schopenhauer.  Werke.  Six  volumes  in  the 
Reclam  Series.  Leipzig,  1892. 

Ribot.  La  Philosophic  de  Schopenhauer. 
Ninth  ed.  Paris,  1909. 

Wallace,  Prof.  W.  Life  of  Schopenhauer 
(Great  Writers  Series).  London,  1890. 

Whit  taker,  Thomas.  "  Schopenhauer/'  in 
Philosophies  Ancient  and  Modern.  London, 
1908. 

Schopenhauer 's  World  as  Will  and  Idea. 
Trans,  by  Haldane  and  Kemp.  Three  vols. 
London,  1884-86. 

-  Essays.    Trans,  by  Belfort  Bax  (Bonn's 
Library).    London,  1891. 

Schopenhauer.  Studies.  Consisting  of  trans- 
lations by  T.  Bailey  Saunders.  Seven  vols. 
London,  1889-96. 

—  Other  essays  translated  by  Madame 
Hillebrand  (London,  1889)  and  by  A.  B.  Ballock 
(London,  1903). 

Herbart,  J.  F.  Werke.  Ed.  Kehrbach.  Fif- 
teen vols.  1887^. 

Wagner.  Vollstdndige  Darstellung  d.  Lehre 
Herbarts.  1896. 


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Hayward,  F.  H.    The  Student's  Herbart.    1902. 

Hamilton,  Sir  W.  Discussions  on  Philosophy. 
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Comte,  Auguste.  Cours  de  Philosophie  Posi- 
tive. Five  vols.  Paris,  1830-42. 

Politigue    Positive.    Four    vols.     Paris, 

I85I-54. 

Caird,  Edward.  The  Social  Philosophy  of 
Auguste  Comte.  Glasgow,  1885. 

Levy-Bruhl.  The  Philosophy  of  A  uguste  Comte. 
English  trans.  London,  1903. 

Whewell,  Wm.  Philosophy  of  the  Inductive 
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Mill,  J.  S.  A  System  of  Logic.  Two  vols. 
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On  Liberty.     London,   1859. 

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Philosophy.  London,  1865. 

Whittaker,  T.  "Comte  and  Mill,"  in 
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Spencer,  Herbert.  First  Principles.  London, 
1862. 

Essays.     Three  vols.     London,  1891. 

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Bradley,  F.  H.  Appearance  and  Reality. 
Third  ed.  London,  1889. 

Lotze,  H.     Mikrocosmus.     1856-64. 

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Edinburgh,  1885. 

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1884. 

Jones,  Sir  Henry.  The  Philosophy  of  Lotze. 
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Hartmann,  Ed.  von.  Die  Philosophic  des 
Unbewussten.  1869.  English  trans,  by  W.  C. 
Coupland.  Three  vols.  London,  1884. 

Nietzsche,  Fr.  Werke.  Leipzig,  1895  ff- 
English  trans,  in  fourteen  vols.  Edinburgh. 

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1909. 

Russell,  Bertrand.  The  Problems  of  Philosophy 
(Home  University  Library).  London,  1912. 


INDEX 

PAGE 

ABBOTT,  E.  A.,  quoted 17 

Agnosticism 82,  85,  86,  170,  172,  174 

Anaximander 15 

Aquinas,  St.  Thomas 5 

Aristotle 4,  7,  9,  22,  31,  59,  63,  155,  168,  171 

Arnold,  Matthew 67 

Athens I  ff. 

Atomism,  revival  of 13,  25 

Averroes 5 

BACON,  ROGER 5 

Bacon,  Francis 15  ff.,  29,  36,  40,  74 

Baur,  F.  C 172 

Bayle,  Pierre 87 

Beneke,  F.  E 149 

Bergson,  Henri 178 

Berkeley,  Bishop,  53,88*?.;  Theory  of  Vision,  89; 

idealism 89  ff.,   108 

Boyle,  Robert 25 

Bradley,  F.  H 69,  173 

Brahe,  Tycho 21 

Brown,  Dr.  Thomas 162 

Bruno,  Giordano 9  ff.,  27,  55,  62,  131 

Byron 144 

CAIRO,  EDWARD 173 

Caird,  John 173 

Calvinism 34 

Catholicism   and  philosophy 2  ff . 

Causation.     See  Hume,  Kant,  Hegel,  Mill. 
Christianity.     See   Catholicism. 

Christina,  Queen 39  ff- 

Church,  Dean,  quoted 17 

Collier,  Arthur 91 

Collins,  Anthony 87 

Columbus 8 

187 


188  Index 

PAGE 

Comte,    Auguste,    154  ff.;    classification   of  the 
sciences,  157;  Politique  Positive,  157;  philosophy 

of  history 157, 161 

Condillac 152 

Copernicanism 8 

Cousin,  Victor no 

DANTE 8 

Darwin,  Charles 169 

Democritus 13 

Descartes,  37,  38  ff.;  on  belief 50,  59,  74,  79,  80,  106 

Duns,  Scotus 6 

ECLECTICS,  French,  151  ff.;  German 174 

Ego,  the  Absolute 128 

Elizabeth,  Princess 39 

Empedocles 79 

Epicurus 12, 27,  36 

Epistemology 79 

Erigena,  John  Scotus 4,  6 

Ethica,  Spinoza's 57 

FICHTE,  J.  G.,  123  ff.;  his  definition  of  God,  I24;~as 
German   patriot,    125;    his    idealism,   126  ff.; 

ethical  standpoint,  129;  later  teaching 134 

Ficino,  Marsilio 7 

Final  causes  in  modern  philosophy,  74;  in  Plato. .  74 

Form  and  Matter 13, 21, 22,  29 

GALILEO 20, 30 

Gassendi 60 

Geulincx 5i>53»6i 

Gilbert 20,  26 

Godwin,  William 167 

Goethe 125 

Green,  T.  H 173 

HAECKEL,  ERNST 177 

Haldane,  Lord 173 

Haldane,  Miss  E.  S.,  quoted 39,  40 

Hamilton,  Sir  William 153  ff.,  160 

Hartmann,  Ed.  von 174  f. 

Harvey 20 


Index  189 

PAGE 

Hegel,  G.  F.  W.,  24,  125,  131;   on  Spinoza,  64 

135  ff.;  Phenomenology  of  Mind,  1 36;  Science  of        .$ 
Logic,   136;  Encyclop&dia,   137;    Philosophy  of 
Law,  137;  ^Esthetics,  137;  Philosophy  of  History, 
137;  his  didactic  method,  138 ff.;  negation  of 

supernatural  religion 141,  143, 150,  152 

Hegelians,  the  English 172  ff. 

Heine 126,  142 

Heracleitus 15, 178 

Herbart,  J.  F 148,  174 

Hobbes,  Thomas 27  ff.,  60,  68,  83 

Hooker,  Richard,  and  the  Social  Contract 36 

Humanism  in  the  nineteenth  century 150 

Hume,  David,  94  ff .;  character  as  a  historian,  95; 
theory  of  causation,  99  ff.;  attitude  towards 
theism,  102,  108;  a  precursor  of  Comte,  156; 

and  of  Mill 161  ff . 

Huxley,  T.  H 154 

Huyghens  on  Descartes 50 

INDUCTION,  Baconian 24 

Innate  ideas 83, 1 15 

JOHN  OF  SALISBURY 6 

Justinian I 

KANT,  IMMANUEL,  104  ff . ;  his  nebular  hypothesis, 
1 06;  on  synthetic  and  analytic  judgments, 
io6ff.;  on  space  and  time,  109  ff.;  Critique  of 
Pure  Reason,  1 13  ff . ;  on  causation,  1 15  ff . ;  moral 
and  religious  philosophy,  ii8ff.,  143,  144,  160, 
161, 162,  177 

Kepler 12,  21,  26 

Klopstock 124 

LAMARCK 167, 168 

Laplace 106 

Leibniz,  G.  W,  70  ff.;  optimism,  72  ff.;  monado- 
logy»  75.  76;  determinism,  77;  pre-established 

harmony 77, 174 

Lewes,  G.  H 126,  131 

Locke,  John,  36,  79  ff.;  on  toleration,    81;    his 

proof  of  theism,  84;  moral  inconsistency,  85,  88,  106,  108 

Lotze,  R.  H 174 

Lucretius 12, 24,  27 


190  Index 

PAGE 

Luther 7 

Lyell,  Sir  Charles 167 

MACAULAY  on  Bacon,  19;  on  Hobbes 34,  87 

McTaggart,  Dr.  J.  E 174 

Maine  de  Biran 152 

Malebranche 51  ff.,  61,  91,  108 

Malthus 167 

Mansel,  H.  L t 154 

Materialists,  German 177 

Mill,  J.  S.,  159  ff.;  System  of  Logic,  161;  meta- 
physics,  163;  theology,   163,  164;  ethics,  164; 

politics,  165;  character 165 

Milne-Edwards 169 

Monadism 14,  86 

NAPIER 20 

Neo-Kantianism 177 

Neo-Platonism 3 

Newton,  Isaac 7 1 ,  72 

Nicolas  of  Cusa 15 

Nietzsche,  Friedrich 176 

Norris,  John 91 

OCCAM 6 

Occasionalism . 52 

Ostwald 177 

PANTHEISM 54, 60 

Parmenides 12 

Pascal 51 

Plotinus 3.7,15,54 

Positivism.     See   Comte 

Power,  idea   of,  in  Spinoza    63;   how  connected 

with  causation 102 

Pragmatism 178 

Proclus 3 

Pythagoreans 12 

REALITY,  degrees  of 69 

Reid,  Thomas 104,  152 

Renaissance,  scientific  activity  of  the 20 

Rousseau 36,  144 


Index  191 

PAGE 

ST.  SIMON 154 

Schelling,  F.  W.  J.,  130  ff.;  natural  philosophy, 
132;  Transcendental  Idealism,  133;  romantic- 
ism, 133;  Absolutism 134,  135, 153 

Schiller,  F.  C.  S.,  quoted 22 

Schopenhauer,  Arthur,    125,  142  ff.;  pessimism, 

144;  metaphysics,  144  ff.;  ethics 147,  175 

Sextus  Empiricus 82 

Shaftesbury ,  Lord,  author  of  the  Characteristics. . .  87 

Shelley 167 

Sidgwick,  Henry 164 

Smith,  Adam 169 

Social  Contract 32 

Spencer,  Herbert,  154,  166  ff.;  Social  Statics, 
1 66;  Psychology,  168;  Synthetic  Philosophy, 
169;  on  religion,  170;  f ormula  of  evolution. .  .  .  171,  174 

Spencer,  Rev.  Thomas . . .  .^ 166 

Spinoza  37>55ff-,  7^,  74.  84^106,  135;  Tractatus 
Theologico-Politicus,  57;  not  a  mystic,  66; 

ethics,  67  ff . ;  return  to  Stoicism 69 

Stael,  Madame  de 152 

Stirling,  Dr.  Hutchison 173 

Strauss,  David 137, 172 

TAYLOR,  Mrs.,  and  J.  S.  Mill 160 

Temple,  Archbishop 124 

Theism.  See  Descartes,  Locke,  Berkeley,  Hume, 
Kant,  Fichte,  Mill 

TimceuSj  Plato's 50 

Toland 87 

Turgot 156 

VAUX,  CLOTILDE  DE,  and  Comte 160 

Voltaire  and  optimism 72 

Vries,  Simon  de,  and  Spinoza 56 

WALLACE,  A.  R 169 

Wallace,  Prof.  William 173 

Whewell,  William 160 

Wordsworth 69 

Wycliffe 6 


A  History  of  the  Sciences 

If  Hitherto  there  have  been  few,  if  any, 
really  popular  works  touching  the  historical 
growth  of  the  various  great  branches  of 
knowledge.  The  ordinary  primer  leaves 
unexploited  the  deep  human  interest  which 
belongs  to  the  sciences  as  contributing  to 
progress  and  civilization,  and  calling  into 
play  the  faculties  of  many  of  the  finest 
minds.  Something  more  attractive  is 
wanted. 

^f  The  above  need  in  literature  has  now 
been  met.  Each  volume  in  the  History 
of  Sciences  is  written  by  an  expert  in  the 
given  subject,  and  by  one  who  has  studied 
the  history  as  well  as  the  conclusions  of 
his  own  branch  of  science.  The  mono- 
graphs deal  briefly  with  the  myths  or 
fallacies  which  preceded  the  development 
of  the  given  science,  or  include  biographical 
data  of  the  great  discoverers.  Consider- 
ation is  given  to  the  social  and  political 
conditions  and  to  the  attitudes  of  rulers 

Q.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New  York  London 


A  History  of  the  Sciences 

and  statesmen  in  furthering  or  in  hindering 
the  progress  of  the  given  science.  The 
volumes  record  the  important  practical 
application  of  the  given  science  to  the 
arts  and  life  of  civilized  mankind,  and 
also  contain  a  carefully-edited  bibliography 
of  the  subject.  Each  volume  contains  from 
twelve  to  sixteen  carefully-prepared  illus- 
trations, including  portraits  of  celebrated 
discoverers,  many  from  originals  not  hither- 
to reproduced,  and  explanatory  views  and 
diagrams.  The  series  as  planned  should 
cover  in  outline  the  whole  sphere  of  human 
knowledge. 

*f[  Science  is  to  be  viewed  as  a  product 
of  human  endeavor  and  mental  discipline, 
rather  than  taken  in  its  purely  objective 
reference  to  facts.  The  essential  purpose 
has  been  to  present  as  far  as  practicable 
the  historical  origins  of  important  dis- 
coveries, also  to  indicate  the  practical 
utility  of  the  sciences  to  human  life. 

G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New  York  London 


A  History  of  the  Sciences 

Each  ^  volume  is  adequately  illustrated,  attractively  printed,  and 
substantially  bound. 

i6mo.    Each,  net,  75  cents.     By  mail,  85  cents. 

History  of  Astronomy 

By  George  Forbes,  M.A.,  F.R.S.,  M.Inst.C.E. 

Formerly  Professor  of  Natural  Philosophy,  Anderson's 
College,  Glasgow 

12  Illustrations 

I  thank  you  for  the  copy  of  Forbes's  History  of  Astronomy  received. 
I  have  run  it  over,  and  think  it  very  good  indeed.  The  plan  seems  ex- 
cellent, and  I  would  say  the  same  of  your  general  plan  of  a  series  of 
brief  histories  of  the  various  branches  of  science.  The  time  appears  to 
be  ripe  for  such  a  series,  and  if  all  the  contributions  are  as  good  as  Prof. 
Forbes's,  the  book  will  deserve  a  wide  circulation,  and  will  prove  very 
useful  to  a  large  class  of  readers. — Extract  from  a  letter  from  Garrett 
P.  Serviss^  B.S. 

History  of  Chemistry 

By  Sir  Edward  Thorpe,  C.B.,  LL.D.,  F.R.S. 

Author  of  ««  Essays  in  Historical  Chemistry,"  '•  Humphry 
Davy  :  Poet  and  Philosopher,"  "  Joseph  Priestley,"  etc. 

12  Illustrations.    Two  vols.    Vol.  I — circa  2000  B.C.  to  1850 
A .D.     Vol.  11—1850  A.D.to  date 

The  author  traces  the  evolution  of  intellectual  thought  in  the  progress 
of  chemical  investigation,  recognizing  the  various  points  of  view  of  the 
different  ages,  giving  due  credit  even  to  the  ancients.  It  has  been  neces- 
sary to  curtail  many  parts  of  the  History,  to  lay  before  the  reader  in 
unlimited  space  enough  about  each  age  to  illustrate  its  tone  and  spirit, 
the  ideals  of  the  workers,  the  gradual  addition  of  new  points  of  view 
and  of  new  means  of  investigation. 

The  History  of  Old  Testament 
Criticism 

By  Archibald  Duff 

Professor  of  Hebrew  and  Old  Testament  Theology  in  the 
United  College,  Bradford 

1 6  Illustrations 

The  author  sets  forth  the  critical  views  of  the  Hebrews  concerning 
their  own  literature,  the  early  Christian  treatment  of  the  Old  Testament, 
criticism  by  the  Jewish  rabbis,  and  criticism  from  Spinoza  to  Astruc, 
and  from  Astruc  until  the  present. 

"  The  treatment  of  the  subject  is  scholarly  and  thorough,  and  fully  ac- 
cepts the  labors  and  the  results  of  medern  biblical  criticism." —  Watchman. 


A  History  of  the  Sciences 

History  of  New  Testament 
Criticism 

By  F.  C.  Conybeare,  M.A. 

Late  Fellow  and  Praelector  of  Univ.  College*  Oxford, 
Fellow  of  the  British  Academy 

II  Illustrations 

"  The  volume  is  the  work  of  a  distinguished  scholar.  .  .  .  It  is 
written  in  the  racy  popular  style  but  .  .  .  it  is  not  so  much  history 
as  a  eulogy.  As  a  eulogistic  summing  up  of  the  work  this  book  may 
be  called  a  success." — Christian  Advocate. 

History  of  Anthropology 

By  Alfred  C.  Haddon,  M.A.,  Sc.D.,  F.R.S. 

Fellow  of  Christ's  College,  University  Reader  in  Ethnology, 
Cambridge 

p  Illustrations 

"  One  of  the  most  fascinating  of  all  sciences,  anthropology  has  been 
treated  in  this  little  book  in  a  way  to  rouse  the  enthusiasm  of  which  it  is 
worthy.  ...  it  will  help  the  inquirer  to  understand  the  present 
status  of  the  science,  and  direct  him  to  the  proper  books  .  .  .  the 
book  is  one  to  be  possessed  by  all  students  of  the  '  science  of  man.' " 

Chicago  Eve.  Post. 

History  of  Geology 

By  Horace  B.  Woodward,  F.R.S.,  F.G.S. 

Assistant  Director  of  Geological  Survey  of  England  and  Wales 

14  Illustrations 

"  Two  hundred  pages  of  thoroughly  digested  information  on  the  principal 
geological  discoveries,  how  they  have  been  arrived  at,  and  some  account 
of  the  workers  to  whom  the  discoveries  are  due." — Chicago  Inter-Ocean. 

History  of  Biology 

By  L.  C.  Miall,  F.R.S. 

ii  Illustrations 

"  This  is  a  wise  and  instructive  book,  such  as  we  have  learned  to  ex- 
pect from  Prof.  Miall.  It  is  scholarly  but  restrained,  so  that  the  reader 
is  not  overwhelmed  with  too  much  learning.  It  is  a  model  of  terseness, 
yet  it  has  that  picturesciueness  of  illustration  which  is  necessary  if  a 
history  is  to  grip  the  ordinary  mind." — Nature. 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 
LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


REC'D  LD 


:.  ',    .... 


JUN   5  BBt! 


U 


1962 


7?; 

S-? 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


